Playwright: Graham Brown. At: trip ( sic ), at Hairpin Arts Center, 2810 N. Milwaukee Ave. Tickets: www.grafenberg.bpt.me; $20. Runs through: March 14
Finding Grafenberg concerns sex, office politics and the sexual subtext often lurking just underneath office politics. The dozen characters are white-collar employees of an anonymous company, ranging from the mail room clerk to a corporate vice-president. It may be coincidence only, but all the actors are white, which probably does not reflect corporate reality today.
Most of the characters are twenty- or thirtysomethings who are on the make professionally and personally, with sexual identity among the personal issues on the table. The 60-minute play mostly is made up of several dozen brief two-character scenes, few lasting more than 90 seconds, as employees interact and occasionally couple and uncouple. At the annual Xmas party, with much liquor consumed, gay and lesbian identities come out and a pregnancy is revealed. The play ends with nothing resolved and a sense that the patterns of behavior will continue.
As written and directed by Graham Brown ( who also plays one of the characters ), Finding Grafenberg is presented entirely on its feet in a triangular loft, with actors and audiences moving freely about the space. A Christmas tree is the only scenery. The hyper-naturalistic dialogue sounds spontaneous and is totally believable in the mouths of the actors, as if you were viewing a home video of random moments from which patterns emerge. Staging it on a realistic office set might not be more effective, but I don't see particular advantages to the complex yet minimalist staging utilized. The loft space has columns which block views and also dreadful acoustics, which can be overcome not by greater volume but through absolutely-crisp diction. Precise diction, however, is not the style of casual speech.
Not all the 12 characters receive equal focus. The bosses ( one male and one female ) receive attention ( especially the female ), as do characters expressing sexual confusion or having serious relationship issues. Whether you care about any of them is another matter. Brown doesn't even bother to give them nameseach is a typealthough the actors enlarge them with well-drawn individual personalities. The style of the work and its delivery are sharp, then, but the substance is less than profound. It's not that the substance is unimportant, only superficial and oh-so-familiar. Every generation creates literature which reinvents the wheel of "who-am-I" and "what-am-I" and "what-is-my-place," and Finding Grafenberg is a millennial example of the form. I think its promenade staging and voice will appeal more to Millennials than to me, and running just an hour it can be part of a fine evening in Logan Square or nearby Bucktown.
FYI: Grafenberg was the doctor after whom "G-spot" was coined in a misinterpretation of his work. The play uses his name, but not that context.