Lisa Kron’s The Veri**on Play [sic], the first of seven full-length and three 10-minute offerings, opened this year’s 36th annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville with a satiric blast at corporate America and its woefully boneheaded customer service.
Kron herself plays befuddled Jenni, plunged into customer-service hell when the phone company and its robotic minions keep bugging her about a billing problem she consistently asks them to correct.
The simplistic plot takes a screwball twist when she comes across an underground group of corporate victims who take her under their wing. Things get crazier with a chase through the phone company’s offices and then around the world to recover a fellow protester taken hostage by the company. It then turns out that Jenni’s sister Anissa (the excellent Carolyn Baeumler), with whom she lives, is a sinister phone-company higher-up and not on Jenni’s side.
Well, it’s funny at times but not consistently with its one-note stance. The venerable San Francisco Mime Troupe could have done a much better satiric cartoonish take on the tired subject. And if putting two asterisks in the title was an attempt to thwart legal action by Verizon, it’s odd that Verizon is clearly targeted and pronounced correctly throughout the play.
