DEAR FRIENDS,

The title of Leslye Headland's ferocious new comedy, Assistance, yields a telling irony when you rub it against its homonym, "assistants." Five fabulously educated, with-it and curiously masochistic assistants to a wantonly abusive and apparently indefatigable offstage overlord comprise the entire population of Assistance. But one could hardly term the abject ministrations they perform for him "assistance." The implicit disparity between the dictionary definition of "assistance" as aid or charity and "assistant" as a subordinate could hardly be more dramatically demonstrated than in this play. No, "assistance" is what these assistants need, not what they give. And the greatest irony of all? They cling to their jobs as if to life itself. What keeps them going? The play never names the business they are in, but all indicators point to some amalgam of the entertainment business, probably something paradoxical like making high-toned movies. Do they believe they are part of a higher cause? None of them ever talk about art. Do they want power? The hope of promotion to a slightly higher subordinate position with a slightly less continuous diet of humiliation dangles as a distant possibility before them, but the most they can reasonably hope for is an assistant of their own, not any real authority. Do they want money? None of them is given enough free time ever to spend anything. No, the test before them seems to be more existential. The play has more in common with plays like No Exit and Waiting for Godot than a traditional workplace drama like The Front Page, so it did not surprise me at all to read that within Leslye's bulletin article that these plays have explicitly influenced her. You will also learn when you flip the page and read Adam Greenfield's adjoining article that Assistance is part of a cycle of contemporary Morality Plays Leslye has written about the so-called Seven Deadly Sins. It is worth noting that several Beckett scholars have compared the metaphysical landscape of his plays with that of the Morality Plays.

The most playfully obvious literary reference in Assistance lies in the names of its lead characters, Nick and Nora. On its simplest level, the names reference the easy banter that springs up between them. And they may not solve a murder between quips, but they certainly amuse themselves while they work, sans the martinis. On another level, the names point to something they're missing, just as the title does. Leslye's Nick and Nora are not a couple, nor do they even dare let themselves think they could be, even though it is obvious to us they should be. As the play develops, our rooting section begins to quiet. Extending Leslye's conceit, can love flourish in hell? Or could love transform hell to heaven? Or would they need to escape hell first? But if they were no longer bound together by this hell, would the bond weaken? These questions live in the afterlife of the play. But in the forelife of the moment, the banter reigns supreme, and as with The Thin Man, it generates a certain bliss, a bliss born from the collision of intelligence and chemistry. I hope you will encounter a similar bliss in your own collision with the intelligence and charisma of the house of fire that is Leslye Headland. It's rare to find a writer whose work is as fiendishly hilarious, deeply thoughtful, painful, and adventurous all at the same time. And she's only just begun.

- Tim Sanford, Artistic Director

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You've heard the old adage that "Hell is other people." Of course you have. Yawn. It's been so oft-repeated that I suppose Hell has lost some of its gravitas, much to the delight of whoever may be in charge down there. I recently heard Tim Keller, one of my favorite Christian writers, sum up Hell in a refreshingly terrifying way. In discussing Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, Keller defined Hell as: "having to execute a pointless act from which nothing ever comes except the need to do it again."

Camus makes the point that our human lives are meaningless and insignificant. Nothing new to anyone who's been a freshman in college. Like just about every other eighteen-year-old fueled by alcohol and boredom, I fell in desperate love with Camus' The Plague, with Ionesco's The Lesson and with Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which I directed as my senior thesis at Playwrights Horizons Theater School at NYU. I was tickled by the way these great men of words narratively imagined the tragic comedy of a meaningless existence. But ultimately I found I didn't quite agree with them that life is completely without meaning. If it were, where does that "need to do it again" that Keller specifies come from? Wouldn't we all just give up? If your actions mean nothing, why get up in the morning? If your job is mind-numbing, why do you keep showing up?

Assistance is about that "need to do it again." But, like absurdist playwrights, I crafted it as a comedy. A decidedly 21st century comedy. I've tried my hand at the witty repartee that accompanies screwball comedies. It's got that popular trope, The Boss From Hell, from so many films and roman a clefs. It's even got a bit of a love story. But the elephant in the room for all the characters is the looming question of "Why do I keep coming back?"

I posed that question to myself several years ago, when I, in tears, ran from my desk, into the elevator, down the street, as far away as I could from the building I'd worked in for six years. The myriad excuses I'd been telling myself for six years all boiled down to one response: "Because that's what you do." It terrified me. It wasn't a good answer. But no matter how I dressed it up, it was the only answer. I was in Hell. And it wasn't my Boss's fault.

My own obsession with being "good enough," with being "successful" and with executing completely pointless acts day in and out had, at some point, shifted from a healthy post-collegiate ambition to an empty routine that was the sole validation for myself. It gave my life meaning.

A lot of people make their jobs their life. A lot of those people probably feel like they have to. Maybe money cushions or reinforces that choice. Maybe the dependence of a family necessitates it. But, for me, when my job became both my prison and my salvation, it was a devastating realization that spurred me toward a new life. When I look back at my frustration, I have to laugh. If you're in Hell but you think you're in Heaven, that's funny to everyone but you.

The characters I love writing the most are very busy doing nothing at all. They chatter on and on about freedom when their actions dictate that they have none. I like to watch them build prisons around themselves. I enjoy seeing them grasp for what they believe will save them and watch it melt away in their hot greedy fists. Because to me, that's funny. Because that's what I do.

My greatest aim is that the audience and I laugh at the same painful joke together. That we all enter the sacred space of a theater, become enshrouded in that ancient darkness and laugh at the absurdity of self.

Photo by Jeff Prout

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TRIP CULLMAN has directed Playwrights Horizons' productions of Adam Bock's A Small Fire and The Drunken City, and Sarah Schulman's Manic Flight Reaction. Other New York credits include Adam Rapp's Nursing, Leslye Headland's Bachelorette, Eli Clark's Edgewise, Lloyd Suh's American Hwangap, Terrence McNally's Some Men, Robert Farquhar's Bad Jazz, Gina Gionfriddo's US DragRoberto Aguirre-Sacasa's Dark Matters, Roland Schimmelpfennig's Arabian Night, Bert V. Royal's Dog Sees God, Glen Berger's The Wooden Breeks, Adam Bock's Swimming in the Shallows, Paul Weitz's Roulette, Brooke Berman's Smashing and Sam and Lucy, Rinne Groff's Of a White Christmas, Ken Urban's The Happy Sad, Gary Sunshine's Sweetness, and Jonathan Tolins's The Last Sunday In June. Artistic Associate, The Play Company. Training: Yale School of Drama. Photo by Aaron Epstein.

During the run of Assistance post-performance discussions with Leslye Headland and Trip Cullman have been scheduled for the following dates:

- Wednesday, February 8
- Sunday, February 12 following the matinee
- Friday, February 17

These discussions are an important aspect of our play development process. We hope you can take part! Click HERE tolog in and book your tickets.

MICHAEL ESPER
BROADWAY: American Idiot, A Man for All Seasons. OFF-BROADWAY: The Lyons (Vineyard), The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide… (Public/Guthrie), Crazy Mary (PH). FILM & TV: Bittersweet Place, A Beautiful Mind, Dying is Easy, "Bunker Hill," "Law and Order."

VIRGINIA KULL
BROADWAY: Man and Boy, Dividing the Estate, Old Acquantance. OFF-BROADWAY: Orphans' Home Cycle (Signature), Theophilus North (Keen Co.). FILM & TV: A NY Thing, "Law and Order," "Guiding Light."

Just as any domestic drama would be incomplete without one real monster of a mother, no workplace play is fit to stage without one hell of a horrible boss, that man (it's almost always a man) so consumed by greed, ambition or sense of entitlement that he is blind to the humanity of his subordinates. In anticipation of Assistance, we offer a tour through theater's most infamous higher-ups. Of course, not all evil employers are created equal. Through rigorous, scientific analysis, we can place them into the following three-fold taxonomy:

THE TYRANT
The oldest and most oft-encountered, the Tyrant is the pre-industrial ancestor of all horrible bosses to come. He operates in the political sphere – typically he's a king or a pretender to the throne – and either he lusts after power (Richard III, Richard III, 1591) or doggedly pursues law and order (Creon, Antigone, 442 BC). Whatever his motives, though, his medium is murder. It's his body count that rises, not his stock. Though he's mostly a classical creature, the Tyrant has adapted to modernity. He's everywhere in movies, TV and comics – the supervillain (Lex Luthor, Superman, 1940-present) or the Disney villain (Scar, The Lion King, 1994) spring to mind – but he remains a fixture onstage as well, if altered to suit a more democratic age. Alfred Jarry's 1896 Ubu Roi turns the Tyrant (the titular Ubu) into a grotesque, infantile id who is more a stand-in for a complacent, selfish bourgeoisie than an attack on an actual corrupt monarch.

THE DIVA
Though not the harmless, foolish master who appears throughout the history of Western comedy, the Diva shares a common ancestor with the bumbling slave-owners of Greek and Roman comedy (Plautus's Menaechmi, 3rd century BC). Physical and emotional gratification are what he requires, and he gets what he wants by the sheer force of his overdeveloped sense of entitlement. He can provoke laughs, as does Sheridan Whiteside, the self-centered celebrity hell-bent on retaining his meek assistant in Kaufman and Hart's The Man Who Came To Dinner (1939). But he's just as apt to trigger fear and loathing, as does the offstage, bell-ringing Count in Strindberg's Miss Julie (1888). The Diva is alive and well today, and is the genus of horrible boss most likely to take female form, as recently evidenced by Gloria, the loopy book editor who compounds the suffering of the Job-like Joe in Stephen Karam's Sons of the Prophet (2011).

THE PROFITEER
The most recent and most recognizable addition to the group, the Profiteer is the soulless capitalist born of the industrial age. His only goal is to make more money as quickly and efficiently as possible. He treats his employees like machines, or better yet, substitutes machines for men. He's the Boss in the The Adding Machine (1923), Mr. Mister in The Cradle Will Rock (1937), Caldwell B. Cladwell in Urinetown (2001), and the profit-hungry son of the titular inventor in Karel Capek's landmark sci-fi drama, R.U.R. (1920). But he assumes subtler forms as well, such as Mitch and Murray, the offstage instigators of the sales contest that precipitates the desperate action of Glengarry Glen Ross (1984).

Of course, there are bosses who push the boundaries. In Angels in America (1993), Roy Cohn has a clear touch of the Tyrant, even if his love for La Cage makes him an obvious Diva, and his "it's just business" attitude smacks of the Profiteer. You'll have to decide where you think Leslye Headland's hellacious jefe Daniel Weissinger fits. Whatever you think of him, we only hope you respect his firm placement in a long, time-tested tradition in the theatrical canon.

- Alec Strum, Associate Literary Manager

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I don't think I'm going out too far on a limb to suggest that, since long before records of such things were kept, human civilization -- while producing moments of intense beauty, etc. -- has largely been populated by a bunch of jerks. Immoral, lazy, beady-eyed, good-for-nothing jerks who cut corners, skim a little off the top and don't call their mothers. (Present company excluded, of course.) So much has this problem plagued us that we've been preoccupied over the millennia with the struggle to classify our shortcomings, rank them in order of their insidiousness, and conceive of systems to cultivate in ourselves an adequate sense of fear and guilt. Enter "The Cardinal Sins," a notion made popular by the 4th Century A.D., when Evagrius Ponticus, a hotshot Christian Monk, developed a categorized list of the temptations from which sinful behavior springs: Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Sorrow, Lust, Anger, Vainglory, and Pride. This list was intended to help us quit acting like such jerks, lest we gain an unwanted invitation to the Hell-Mouth (see figures below).

The sin of "sorrow" was ultimately dropped from the list as theologians determined over the next several centuries (perhaps in response to the plague?) that sadness is inextricably human and doesn't necessarily pave the road to hell. The revised list became known more commonly as "The Seven Deadly Sins," a catchier moniker that captured the imagination of countless artists, from Dante to Hieronymous Bosch; from Christopher Marlowe to Kurt Weill to indie group Panic! at the Disco.

It has also captured the imagination of playwright Leslye Headland, who in just four remarkably prolific years has created six plays of an ambitious, seven-play play cycle of dark comedies, each installment centered around one of mankind's damnable vices. "Awful people deserve good stories too," Headland told The New York Times last summer: a sentence that could very well serve as a slogan for this series of "Seven Deadly Plays," each more savage, more unforgiving, more stiletto-sharp than the last. Cinephilia (2007) takes on the sin of Lust, focusing on a pair of cinema-geek twenty-something Brooklynites who struggle to keep sex from meaning anything. Her brutal, unsparing play Bachelorette (2008) is the champagne- and drug-soaked story of a bachelorette party from hell. As a trio of nihilistic, terrifically awful single girls almost destroy their hotel room, their best friend's wedding, and themselves, they demonstrate the numbing, destructive impact of Gluttony. In Surfer Girl (2008), an unsettling confessional monologue, a professional couch-surfer takes stock of her own Sloth, reliving in intimate detail her years of surviving off the hospitality of others. Heading west, Headland set Reverb (2009), her explosive view of Wrath, in L.A.'s indie rock scene. Fueled by the abuse and violence of their childhoods, an Echo Park hipster couple can only find love in the pain -- both verbal and physical -- that they inflict upon one another. And The Accidental Blonde (2010) examines the Envy between two deeply estranged friends, one a rising reality TV star and the other a struggling comics illustrator, who find that the long-held antipathy they share binds them together more strongly than love ever would.

Informed by the pop-culture-saturated landscape of today's over-educated, underemployed internet generation, The Seven Deadly Plays place these infamous vices at the core of twenty-somethings' struggles. Taken individually, each play is a sexy, savvy and unexpectedly funny picture of characters hell-bent on self-destruction; but as a cycle, these plays create a panoramic portrait of a generation in search of a moral compass. It's tempting , particularly for literary dept. dorks like me, to think of Leslye's anthology to date as a kind of latter-day morality drama. Reaching their popularity in the 14th and 15th centuries, "morality plays" evolved from the desire to teach the principles of Christian living in a more direct fashion than the early tradition of merely re-enacting stories from the Bible. These strident and (by today's standards) extraordinarily ham-fisted allegories portray an everyman-type protagonist who is confronted by personifications of various vices or virtues (characters might literally be named, simply, "Lust" or "Justice") who either aid or obstruct his struggle to lead a godly life. In Headland's playworld, characters seem to have a distant sense that there is, out there somewhere, a godly life (or at least one where they aren't such jerks), but they aren't wired to find it. Which is what distinguishes her writing from morality drama. The twenty-somethings who populate her plays have little hope of finding a moral compass; they would need a second compass just to locate the first. Redemption, a promise at the heart of any morality play, is in Leslye's work often quite literally a pipe dream.

And yet, that's not to say -- at all, actually -- that her work is nihilistic, or that any one of Headland's characters is simply reveling in some pig-slop of depravity. It's not that they are simply loathsome (which would make boring drama), it's that they are lost. What Leslye shares in common with the theater-moralists is that which is at the heart of all great drama: the struggle of mankind against his or her own soul, the struggle of the individual to understand in some way, however small, how to live. I was surprised to learn recently, in light of her plays, that one of her largest sources of inspiration over the years has been C.S. Lewis (novelist, medievalist, Christian apologist). But, in going back and revisiting her work to date, the echo of his voice became suddenly apparent: "My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust," Lewis wrote in his essay "Mere Christianity" (1942-1944). "But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?" Leslye Headland's work -- degenerate, decadent, and electric-funny – isn't morality drama. Nor is it immorality drama. Rather, I imagine it's best described as an exploration of the crooked line, created in search of the elusive straight one. Assistance might take us into the hell-mouth of a Tribeca office, where an ensemble of greedy bottom-rung assistants suffers daily humiliations just to be in the orbit of one man's power, but between each line it asks us to find a way not to stay there.

- Adam Greenfield, Director of New Play Development

Generous support for our production of Assistance was provided by Time Warner, Inc., which also provides leadership support of The American Voice: New Play and Musical Theater Development at Playwrights Horizons.

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Jump to: Tickets // From Tim Sanford // Playwright's Perspective // Casting // Helpful Info

Jump to: Tickets // From Tim Sanford // Playwright's Perspective // Casting // Helpful Info

HOW TO RESERVE YOUR SEATS

SUBSCRIBERS & FLEXPASS HOLDERS:
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MEMBER TICKETS START ATJUST $30 (reg. $70):
Member tickets to Assistance are $30 each for February 3-19 and $35 each for all other performances Feb. 21-March 11. and may be reserved using any of the above methods. YOUNG MEMBERS: 30&Under Member tickets are $20; Student Member tickets are $10.

GUEST TICKETS subject to availability
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MEMBERS: Order one guest ticket per package per production for $50 (reg. $70) when you reserve your own. YOUNG MEMBERS: 30&Under guest tickets are $25. Student Member tickets are $15. Students may bring a 30&Under guest and vice versa.
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AGE-APPROPRIATE?
We recommend Assistance for those aged 14+ (strong language).

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If you would like to change your account preferences to either join or leave the Go Green program, please contact the Maketing Department at marketing@playwrightshorizons.org or (212) 564-1235, ext. 3152 (M-F, 10am-6pm). We respond to all questions, comments, and concerns. For questions or concerns about your tickets or package, please call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200 (Noon-8pm daily). E-mail marketing@playwrightshorizons.org with questions or comments about productions.

The Mainstage Bulletin is generously funded, in part, by the Liman Foundation.
This production is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Special thanks to the Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater for its generous support of Assistance.

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Photos: Photos of Gina Gionfriddo, Kirsten Greenidge, Jordan Harrison, and Itamar Moses by Aaron Epstein. Photos of Leslye Headland and Dan LeFranc by Jeff Prout. Photo of Tim Sanford by Christine Gatti.