Empathy counselor Sophia has no idea what she’s in for when she arrives at a debt collection office to teach an employee a lesson on compassion.
“Do You Feel Anger?” is a workplace comedy coming to Jeffersonville, and the laughter woven throughout the play helps some of its harsh realities go down a bit easier, according to director Tory Parker.
“You can expect to laugh till you cry, but then to also cry,” she said.
Parker directs an upcoming Untitled Louisville Theatre Company production of the play at the NoCo Arts & Cultural District during various dates Feb. 6 through Feb. 15.
The play, written by Mara Nelson-Greenberg, first premiered at the 2018 Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville. This is the first time the play is returning to the region since its debut.
When the play debuted, President Donald Trump was in the middle of his first term in office on the heels of the #MeToo movement and Time’s Up campaign exposing rampant sexual harassment and misconduct women faced in the workplace and their everyday lives.
“This is explicitly, kind of in conversation with that larger conversation of women in the workplace and how much they've just kind of had to silently put up with for decades,” Parker said.
It has been a balancing act for the cast to hold the play’s levity and the serious subject matter.
“You have to tell the truth in order to even have comedy and to have that levity,” said Keith McGill, who plays Old Man in the show. “But you also have to tell the truth so that through all that comedy and levity people hear what they've heard before, hear themselves or recognize something that they might not have recognized if they were in the middle of it.”
McGill said that a moment of reflection is important for audiences to digest and apply what they’re seeing on stage in their real lives.
The play straddles different worlds. Sophia acts as a stand in for the audience, living in reality that accepts logic. The employees at the debt collection office occupy another world, one that’s absurd and unyielding to reason.
Ali Gautier plays Sophia, the empathy counselor.
“I'm very used to playing the goofy, the funny. And so this is a really big change of pace for me, but I've really enjoyed it,” Gautier said.
Gautier said the hardest part has been rehearsing the play’s most difficult scenes repeatedly.
“My therapist and I have been pretty busy the last couple weeks, because it's very real themes that we're dealing with bring up some really hard things, some trauma and stuff,” Gautier said. “That's also what comedy is for me, like, professionally and in my life, how I've always used it.”
Park, the director, said revisiting the play in 2025 brings a new energy.
“In 2018 we had the midterm elections, where there was an overwhelming sweep of, like, progressives elected, and I think that had a real sense of hope, of like, oh, this was the turning point that we needed,” Parker said of the discussion and demand for inclusive and safe workplaces. “I think we're approaching it in a much darker world. I mean, we reelected the same guy, and Roe has been overturned, and there are just the DEI initiatives of major corporations, of whole states are being overturned today.”
Staging contemporary works that speak to current time and circumstances is a large part of Untitled Louisville Theatre Company’s mission.
Parker said, with the loss of the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre in Louisville, there is a lack of places for newer works to be staged.
“I love classics, specifically Shakespeare, but I think there's a real hunger for contemporary theater in this region,” Parker, who co-founded Untitled Louisville Theatre Company, said. “I want plays that were written recently, that conceptualize women as we conceptualize them now, because playwrights are brilliant and they have something to say.”
McGill said newer works give younger audiences a chance to connect with theater.
“If we want to continue theater, we have to listen to that generation of people going to the theater and talk to them directly, talk to them in the language that they are speaking right now,” McGill said. “If you have the contemporary words, they'll speak directly to them. It's like, ‘Oh, I understand this language. I don't have to fight through the language to get to the message. The message is right there, and I can hear it.’”
“Do You Feel Anger?” aims to bring that contemporary language to the stage to confront real life issues with a hint of humor.
