Fully Committed

Play (1999)
by Becky Mode

With Gabriel Kuttner (Sam)

The reservations manager is on the phone, endlessly and constantly. Tables are scarce, and reservations are hard to come by, but people of all different stripes try to get one, and, if they are unable, they try to complain endlessly, or connive and bribe. There is a moody chef, a hot-headed line cook, and an irresponsible co-reservationist to boot. Meanwhile, Sam has other fish to fry, and it is not clear how long he can manage to endlessly juggle the impossible and deal with the parade of demands and insults.

Gabriel Kuttner has a real genius for impersonation. There are literally dozens of characters who show up here – mostly over the phone – and in rapid sequence. Almost the entire show functions by having Sam, Kuttner’s main character, switch calls on an incoming line and taking up the personalities of those on the other end. His ear for accents is impeccable, and with expert voice and a few gestures he manages to bring a huge cast of characters to life.

The moody chef is English or Australian and full of himself. The line chef is Hispanic and hilariously feisty and irascible. There seems to be a call from a sheik from the Middle East. And there is a request for a helicopter. In the middle of this, the chef makes some daunting housecleaning demands on Sam, then cannot get over that he actually fulfilled the request.

There are calls of a more personal sort from family members and from places where Sam seeks promising news.

The action is breathless and nonstop, constantly changing, a collage of voices and characters that eventually begins to manifest its dominant forms.

Quite a way into the show, which only runs 75 minutes (though what an action and dialogue packed 75 minutes that is), I did wonder whether there was any drive or focus to all of it. Finally, in its own subtle way, that focus emerged, and one could begin to separate the calls which meant something from those which merely added to the mêlée.

That the action takes place on Christmas provides a special frame to this high energy ride through an open field of crazy characters. Like a good photograph which demarcates an area of appreciation, this play begins to generate, in the midst of that open field, a sense of where the important stuff lies.

It is amazing to see Kuttner do his thing in this virtuoso outing. One can barely imagine how he keeps all the balls in the air, remembering what goes where and who enters when. But he does, and he does it authoritatively and with panache.

– BADMan