Considering the title question, the answer is yes, mostly for what’s going on in our country today, but also a little less important anger toward this show. Well, anger is too strong a word. Maybe annoyance is better.
In this play by Mara Nelson-Greenberg and directed by Margot Bordelon a woman is assigned to work with employees of a company with a view toward getting a few key ones to feel better about themselves and those with whom they work. Call it anger management. The advisor, Sofia is played with cheery determination by Tiffany Villarin. The employees are Jon (Greg Keller), Jordan (Ugo Chukwu), Howie (Justin Long) and Eva (Megan Hill).
The portraits at first are funny and for a brief while the play looks as if it is satirizing both the employees and the questioning process of Sofia’s method. But such a notion soon collapses when the action becomes so crazy and the people involved so patently stupid that their ditsy antics become tiresome.
The so-called comedy descends into a complete mess, with dumb outbursts and dumber talk. Every once in a while at the side of the stage there is telephone call by Sofia’s mother (Jeanne Sakata), distraught over not getting Sofia on the phone or her calling back.
Of course, we know that all of the anger management efforts will fail, and Sofia herself will erupt. When male employees rebel and corner Sofia with the indication that they want to rape her, she wields a bat and becomes horrendously angry to the point of violence. There follows a mystifying coda that takes place in a women’s bathroom and defies sensible interpretation.
Apparently the playwright is getting at the role of women and how they are treated as well as the suggestion that anger is raging within all of us. But the play is so confoundedly idiotic that sitting through it becomes increasingly difficult. At the Vinyard Theatre, 108 East 15th Street. Phone: 212-353-0303. Reviewed April 19, 2019.