Services Tendered
Brits off-Broadway, the Anglophile's dream theater festival, has once again cantered into 59E59. And getting it off to a cracking start is "The Receipt," an inordinately adorable piece by Will Adamsdale and Chris Branch, the same actor-musician team that last collaborated on 2005's "Faster" and "Jackson's Way. " Although this outing can't be summed up as neatly as their earlier hits, this slightly sloppier show lays the groundwork for better things to come.
"The Receipt," despite oozing charm, has its bumpy sections and the boys seem to know it. The work still smells of being devised, with ideas broached but never entirely developed and digressions that smack of the "wouldn't it be cool if" approach. But these are unavoidable consequences of a team, fresh off roaring comic successes, trying to deepen and complicate its work.
Mr. Adamsdale welcomes us to the future or at least he would if Mr. Branch would hush up and stop playing the synthesizer intro and into his archaeological lecture. A long-ago civilization, hilarious in its perversity, Mr. Adamsdale tells us, relied heavily on bits of paper, redundant signage ("Come in, have a cup of coffee!" says a coffee-shop window), and industries with idiotic mottoes. While Messrs. Adamsdale and Branch tussle gently over the storytelling, they disclose a world of all-too-familiar 21st-Century Glondon, full of people mindlessly generating paper and slowly letting jargon steal the language right out of their mouths.
Mr. Adamsdale, as one of said hapless Glondoners, works at a job he doesn't fully understand and is persecuted by a chain of matey gatekeepers (all played by Mr. Branch), who demand coffee tickets and entry dockets and subway passes and the list goes on. Our overwhelmed Everyman is himself a bit of an archaeologist once he discovers a receipt stuck to his shoe, its provenance obsesses him. Tracking down its owner soon noses him towards madness, since it's clearly nuts to let one piece of meaningless bit of paper trump all the other equally meaningless bits.
Accompanying Mr. Adamsdale's dizzied blunderings, Mr. Branch's music comes banging out of synthesizers and a set of metal drawers. Give these men a filing cabinet, and they will give you the world. Just when they seem to be spoofing urban claustrophobia, they place a miniature on a filing cabinet, zooming our perspective out to its cinematic limit. Suddenly, each battered set component looks like a building, and the room itself turns into the Glondon cityscape, twinkling in front of us in something like peace.
The satire doesn't feel uniformly sharp: The archaeologists wax befuddled over "computers named for fruit" and carrier bags printed with the words "Medium brown bag." Enh. While they do a lovely job with some of the modern world's absurdities as in their wicked imitation of office life other comic riffs just pad their indictment. Luckily, both men just happen to be titanic talents. Their loose, appealing bond onstage, played as mild frustration, gilds over any of their less-thansparkling moments.
What's truly thrilling here, though, is the piece's potential. At its best, "The Receipt" spins into Pynchonesque territory, with word games functioning as clues for a puzzle that gradually spreads into conspiracy that then shifts into delusion. Aided by dramaturge Kate McGrath, the play's initial structure the archaeological presentation peeling back to show a narrative makes an exciting first impression. How far down will they excavate? Through how many layers of sedimented storytelling can we slice? Sadly for us, the work stops at two. But given Mr. Adamsdale's and Mr. Branch's talents, we can rest assured that someday they'll dig a lot deeper.
Until May 27 (59 E. 59th St., between Madison and Park avenues, 212-279-4200).
