Director's Notes from "Assistance" at Theatre Vertigo

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
-Samuel Beckett

Daniel Weisinger, the assistants’ powerful boss, is never seen in this play and we don’t know what he does. That’s ok. We don’t need to. We know men (and women) like him already. Usually, they are the uber-powerful and uber-rich. Occasionally they run for president. But more importantly, though we despise the powerful, we also long to be them. We hate them because we are not them, and we strive to supplant them. The assistants do not need Daniel’s insults to feel they are worthless. The mantra that they will never be good enough runs endlessly inside their heads. We all have Daniels inside us; our world nurtures his poisonous voice that we are failures.

And yet we try to succeed. This play is a rapid fire of signals that make the engine of success. The assistants buzz around the office, transferring information and ticking off tasks like human machines. It is a beautiful chaos that echoes our modern networks - cords, wires, ducts, towers, keyboards, motherboards, pocket-sized boxes of glass and plastic charged with electrical pulses and then hid underground and under sea, behind walls, and above our heads and in our pockets, giving us the illusion that our connections are illusory, even magical. We too, hide our deepest desires for validation and connection beneath fear. With Assistance, I’m interested in the rare moments when people take off the insulation and are live wires colliding into each other, whether they succeed or ultimately fail.