American Signs (Sydney Theatre Co) ★★★★

Written by Anchuli Felicia King. World Premiere. Sydney Theatre Co. 15 Jun – 14 Jul, 2024.

No one likes management consultants. Even management consultants don’t like management consultants. It takes a performer of immense empathy to make us care for them and thankfully Catherine Văn-Davies is dynamic in this one-person show.

It’s all about statistics, and the stats on the lead character are this. Twenty-something, third-generation Vietnamese-American, Stanford graduate, horse enthusiast, starting her career at a top tier consultancy firm. One day she is chosen by her far-too-handsome (and far-too-married) superior, Max, to fly with him to Ohio to study a lighting manufacturer and look for cost cutting measures. She admires the way his manner is charming and friendly but his language is always non-committal, and the way his polo shirts fit very tightly… Moral quandaries are irrelevant, it all comes back to the data.

Playwright King dissects the semantic sedative that is corporate-speak and the hundred ways they have to say “lay offs”. The unnamed consultant is ambitious but clear sighted when it comes to the meaninglessness “values” her employers talk about. They’re nonsense, and she knows it, but she chooses to believe. Just as King ripped into the world of marketing in her play White Pearl, here she takes on the shadier world of management where numbers and profitability are more important than people. 

The moral trick of consultancy is the lack of direct responsibility. They are handsomely paid to advise, not the act. As the character states, they don’t do policy, just crunch the numbers. They give upper management the distance and excuses they need to avoid the blame for their actions. But when The Consultant hears of a disaster caused by her recommendations, her professional distance starts to break down. 

While the subject matter is nothing particularly new, it’s very well presented. Designer James Lew and Lighting Designer Benjamin Brockman have created a set of sharp lines and neon that easily takes us from an office, to a factory, to a shop, a chapel and a hotel room without distraction. The rear wall of mirrors keeps us, the audience, in the picture at all times, and a single laptop flashes phrases of jargon like chapter headings. Into this cold, inorganic space, Văn-Davies is at once part of the furniture, then an agent of disruption.

Director Kenneth Moraleda doesn’t give The Consultant pause. She is on stage from the moment the audience enters, and sits patiently as we leave – with no curtain call. She is forced to keep her mask up, ignoring the passersby. Much like her story, there is no real end, only a dawning realisation that the machinery of capitalism moves on with or without you. It numbs us all to the horrors we create and support.

King uses race to demonstrate that for all the talk of cold hard data, even corporate greed is not colour-blind. The Consultant is chosen for the role because of her boss’s racial fetish. The head of the lighting factory being “right-sized” is an African-American woman. Her bosses are white. 

Much like White Pearl, I felt American Signs was playing with big ideas around race and modernity, but I couldn’t quite get a solid grasp on what it actually wanted to say – I could intuit meanings, but they weren’t necessarily being presented to me. This melange of capitalism, race, horses and neon is gripping, but I feel like I’m personally still not 100% on King’s wavelength as a writer.

Catherine Văn-Davies is that wonderful mix of approachably lovable but also dramatically intense. She flips from tone to tone like a gymnast, coalescing the big themes into a personal story of one young woman’s life. She’s twenty-something, making romantic mistakes and losing her idealism. The really tragic part is how she ultimately shapes herself into another soulless cog in the machine for the cold, hard cash. Capitalism at its most insidious. 

At a swift 70 minutes duration, American Signs is great for these cold winter nights (you’ll still have time to grab dinner after, or just get home to bed early). The combination of Anchuli Felicia King’s words and Catherine Văn-Davies’ presence, along with the seamless production team, make this a perfect little black-box theatre show, and a welcome christening for the Sydney Theatre Company’s smaller Wharf 2 space.