The Thugs

In Jason Wells’s Men of Tortuga, a shadowy cabal of corporate executives plots an assassination. New York playwright Bock’s Chicago debut, now running in rep with Tortuga at Profiles, makes a remarkable dovetail; with its combination of the paranoid and the banal, The Thugs could be about those cutthroat execs’ own underlings.

As a portrait of lowest-level office politics, The Thugs is dead-on. Seven temps work on an anonymous but allegedly “dumb” case, mechanically highlighting and Post-it–flagging document after document. With the staccato rhythm of his dialogue mirroring the percussive stamping, filing, pen-tapping soundtrack of office doldrums, Bock deftly illustrates the ways our personal lives infiltrate even the most aloof work relationships. Jahraus’s tightly choreographed direction allows just the right amount of quirk to seep through the seams, particularly in the performances of Caroline Dodge Latta as a trying-too-hard eccentric and Bob Pries as the over-insinuating office gay.

But there’s more going on beneath the surface of this unexpectedly deep 55-minute play, and Bock smartly chooses not to reveal everything. Two people have died in the building in the last couple of weeks—and depending where you get your info, they could be accidents, suicides or murders. As a storm pounds down on the office windows, Bock’s light touch counterintuitively increases the suspense. In our information-saturated urban lives, the playwright seems to say, the less we know, the more likely we are to panic.