Review: WORK HARD HAVE FUN MAKE HISTORY, with First Floor Theater.
First Floor Theater's latest production - reid tang's WORK HARD HAVE FUN MAKE HISTORY, directed by Tina El Gamal, now playing at Raven Theater - is a dizzying work whose highs are intoxicating and whose lows are infuriating. If anything, it captures our modern-day hellscape almost too well, where the brief respite of joy and wonder amidst capitalist enshittification is more than welcome, but then, as expected, the slop returns apace. I'm genuinely not implying that there are elements of El Gamal's production that should even be mentioned in the same sentence as the word "slop," but the elation I was feeling in the show's top half fizzled to such a degree that I was worried if we'd ever return.
The core issues start and end with tang's script, a bevy of scenes - some interconnected, some not, and some that may be connected but are left up to interpretation - chronicling our nightmare present and the potentialities of our nightmare future. We view this montage of moments through the lens of companies that may or may not be Amazon, and the billionaire antics of people who may or may not be Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the horrors of late-stage capitalism laid bare before us. We see scenes of warehouse workers, sad partners, and sadder parents, all grappling with a world running on convenience at the cost of our shared humanity.
Things start off on a wonderfully exciting foot, with the first 30-to-40 minutes of the play consisting entirely of silent onstage action by the three ensemble members (Sahar Dika, Jenn Geiger, and Alice Wu) while separate phone call voiceovers are heard overhead. A joyously dissonant experience begins between the physical scenes and the voiceovers, though some thematic overlap does start to develop. These sections are where El Gamal's strengths as a director most shine, relying solely upon their game trio of actors, their impeccable design team - special kudos going to scenic designer Spencer Donovan and box facade artist Jackie Berland - and their innate imaginative instincts to create scenes that evoke the mania and playfulness of downtown New York theatre at its finest.
Surprisingly, then, it’s when tang’s script begins to delve into specificity where it actually loses us as an audience. As would be expected in this sort of thing, eventually the onstage actors do begin to speak, and the abstract becomes grounded. As we delve into more and more scenes and engage with more and more new characters, the fast-paced rhythms and theatrical playfulness we had become so accustomed to begins to evaporate, leaving us with leaden moments that seem to lead nowhere. Worst of all are the scenes with characters acting as avatars for Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, which feels like a sadly tired choice for mockery in a play brimming with otherwise exciting new ideas and images.
tang is the kind of playwright that the contemporary American theater needs more of, while also being the kind of playwright most people might point to as to why they hate contemporary theater. Their work is arch and bizarre, writing the kinds of plays where the scripts contains frequent emojis and the characters have names like NO and CLOSED and NOT BABY. They grasp at important themes in interesting ways while simultaneously dabbling in obvious humor. You start to get exhausted by their intellect after a while.
If there’s any reason to see WORK HARD HAVE FUN MAKE HISTORY, it’s for the work of Tina El Gamal as director, alongside the combined work of Dika, Geiger, and Wu, a trio of remarkably game performers completely dialed in to the styles and movements required to keep things afloat. El Gamal emerges here as a thrilling theater maker whose sense of space, imagery, and surprise shines throughout the work. One hopes we get to see them working at a steady pace in Chicago, creating more evocative visions of the the flailing world around.
WORK HARD HAVE FUN MAKE HISTORY runs an estimated 90 minutes with no intermission, and performs at Raven Theatre (6157 N. Clark) through June 6th 2026. Tickets are available HERE.
