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Judd Hirsch in Seattle

 

 

A farcical and funny skewering of globalized corporate culture, Below the Belt centers on three men working at an anonymous factory where they feverishly crank out units of some unnamed product while trying to maintain some semblance of humanity and self, despite a crushingly conformist and hyper-masculine bureaucracy. Richard Dresser’s surreally comic and occasionally unsettling play comments on the profound loneliness that separates men and how they work together (or don’t) in the face of the rules that box them in.

The trio of characters dreams of promotion and of going home. They vie for one-upmanship in an all-too-familiar corporation that is never named. They continuously shift alliances and try to "get ahead" in a system where the predators, both real and imagined, seem to lurk around every corner. Cross the sitcom The Office with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and the results might look something like Below the Belt: darkly funny, and disconcertingly familiar.

Hirsch, who earned Tony Awards for Conversations with My Father and I'm Not Rappaport, previously starred in the 1996 off-Broadway production of Below the Belt. His extensive stage credits include Sixteen Wounded, Art, A Thousand Clowns, Talley's Folly, Chapter Two, Knock Knock, The Hotel Baltimore, and Barefoot in the Park. He is well known for his screen roles in Taxi, Dear John, Ordinary People, and Numb3rs. Joining Hirsch are long-time Seattle treasures John Procaccino and R. Hamilton Wright, both of whom have worked on virtually every Seattle stage.

Procaccino most recently was seen at Intiman as Willie Stark in All the King’s Men and at ACT in Bach at Leipeg, Fiction, The Night of the Iguana, and A Moon For the Misbegotten. He has appeared in Yasmina Reza’s Art with both Hirsch and Wright, but not at the same time or at the same theatre. Wright will be directing ACT’s production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (April 10-May 10), and was last  seen in 2008 at ACT in Intimate Exchanges and Becky’s New Car, with other memorable ACT appearances including Bach at Leipzig, Born Yesterday, and Stuff Happens as George W. Bush. He was most recently seen at Seattle Repertory Theatre as Paul Sycamore in You Can’t Take It With You.