ETHAN Coen’s characters talk, talk, talk. They attack and parry and revel in wordy digressions. And although the lifelike sets and costumes in Coen’s “Offices” reek of Staples and Men’s Wearhouse, the language isn’t so much realistic as hyper-realistic.
Coen may well have created a new genre: cubicle surrealism.
In both this triptych of one-act comedies and the earlier, similarly constructed “Almost an Evening,” Coen’s writing for the stage displays the same virtuosic quality — and the same problems — found in the movies he makes with his brother, Joel.
Abandoning movement, music and, well, plot in his stage work, Ethan Coen focuses solely on dialogue. He’s particularly good at having aggressive characters launch into progressively unhinged riffs, as if the words acquired a life of their own. A quick aside about the Internet in the middle play, “Homeland Security,” is a prime example of Coen’s touch: It’s as if he turned on a tap of bile.
Fixing as he does on the workplace, this type of verbal satire could have been a perfect complement to the more situational approach of TV’s “The Office” and Mike Judge’s cult movie “Office Space.”
Coen comes closest to this goal when the material and the actors (directed with economical precision by Neil Pepe) fall in perfect sync. In the opening one-acter, “Peer Review,” Joey Slotnick seethes powerlessly as a black sheep whose anger is both the root and the consequence of his ostracism by colleagues, themselves as mediocre as they are self-satisfied.
The final piece, “Struggle Session,” concerns itself with hiring and firing, and whether one should play the game at all, but its biggest achievement is to reveal F. Murray Abraham as the Yo-Yo Ma of cursing.
Taunting his new colleagues with his discovery of a sexual position guaranteed to please the most demanding of women, Abraham is the cunning linguist of any playwright’s dreams.
At its best, Coen’s writing can achieve an almost hypnotic effect — up until the moment you snap out of a logorrhea-induced trance and realize the show, pleasant as it is, doesn’t add up to all that much. The plays may glide by as effortlessly as Riccardo Hernandez’s revolving set, but they don’t have any traction.
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OFFICES
Linda Gross Theater, 336 W. 20th St.; 212-279-4200.