City Garage presents

by Urs Widmer

translated by Patricia Benecke

September 9 – October 14, 2000

Directed by Frederique Michel

Production Design and Dramaturgy by Charles A. Duncombe Jr.

Assistant Director Paul M. Rubenstein

Tatiana Alvarez

Joel Drazner

Richard Grove

Dyan Kane

Dennis Ottobre

Mark Rebernik

Bo Roberts

Gene Williams

Set/Sound/Lighting Design Charles A. Duncombe Jr.

Assistant Director Paul M. Rubenstein

Light/Sound Operator Michael Connelly

Costumes Erin Vincent

Stage Managers Jennifer Dion, Jody Moschetti

Videography Charles A. Duncombe Jr., Cristian YoungMiller

Video Editing Arosh Ayrom

Poster Photography Adam Knott

Production Photography Elizabeth Oakes

Produced by special arrangement with the Elizabeth Marion Agency

This production is presented with the support of Pro Helvetia – The Arts Council of Switzerland, The Consulate General of Switzerland, and The Goethe lnstitut, Los Angeles

[NOTE: Top Dogs was originally presented in repertory with The Presidents.]

About the productions:

One of the things we do at City Garage is introduce new European work to the Los Angeles audience. Clearly, we’re entering a time when notional and cultural borders are rapidly disappearing; if we are going to understand the emerging global community and our place in it, we have to listen closely to the voices coming out of other countries. We have to begin to interpret our own identity not just through our traditional, parochial American mindset, but in light of a cross-cultural struggle to grapple with sweeping new economic realities, emerging technologies of incredible power, disrupted societies, fractured traditions, decaying political systems, and value systems that after centuries of acceptance are increasingly called info question. Where are we going? If we listen closely enough we might find out.

We’re happy to have worked closely with the Goethe lnstitut and the Swiss and Austrian Consulates in bringing these two challenging new plays to you. Both of them make compelling comments on aspects of this global struggle to come to terms with the unsettling upheavals of our times; one in terms of economics, the other in terms of history.

An American audience, on first encounter with Top Dogs, might feel a curious sense of disjunction or even confusion about the attitudes the businessmen and women display: these (mostly) European executives expected they would be with their corporate employer for life. Finding themselves now on the scrap heap is appalling not just in its economic implications but, more fundamentally, in the shock and betrayal they feel. To an American that shock might seem curious or even naïve. Clearly, in our corporate reality no one any longer expects to spend a career with a single employer, least of all the CEO. Part of the interest of Top Dogs is seeing how the transformation of the American corporate world that occurred in the 70s and 80s – a time when the old corporate model was mergered, downsized, and outsourced right out of existence – is now sweeping the globe. European corporations, once as paternal as the old GM, have adopted the American ideal of ruthlessness, an attitude rewarded by the stock market and demanded by shareholders, and its management work force is in precisely the same state of shock and despair that the white-collar workers of this country were a generation ago. Everything that they counted on is gone; their sense of identity and self-worth is shattered; they have lost the ability to define themselves; the corporate parent – lover, mother, friend, father – has orphaned them. Ah yes, we might say: we went through all that. Now it’s your turn; just a little gift from American corporate culture to the rest of the world.

But really, how distant is this kind of work/identity trauma from us? Though the international work force may be struggling with the first phase of something we have long since absorbed, the emotional turmoil these characters experience is in many ways no different than what we still, as a society, are struggling with every day. Despite a time of unparalleled prosperity (a fad of which we are ceaselessly reminded), we are also in a time of unparalleled workplace instability, a time when workers are quickly used up and discarded, where organized labor, increasingly co-opted into shareholder status, has no voice, where institutional memory is lost to ceaseless employee turnover, where an older worker has no place and is steadily forced out or forced down to more and more menial jobs, where our identities are still primarily defined by our career, and when that career comes to an end, almost always without warning, the result can be as devastating as it is to the characters we observe in Top Dogs. We watch them tell their stories, watch them increasingly dehumanized, turned info electronic images, tribalized, regressing into ritual; we see, in miniature, our community reduced to a collective scream of helplessness. Why? If anything, Widmer seems to be appealing to us look farther than a career as a means of defining a human life, and though we may pay lip service to this idea, here in Los Angeles of all places, we must stop and question to what extent we really do.

The Swiss writer Urs Widmer was born on May 21, 1938. He studied Romance Languages and Literature, German Language and Literature and History and became one of the cofounders of the Verlag der Auforen (Authors’ Publishing House). In addition to his often scurrilous but always imaginative shorter and longer stories, he has also translated works by several authors, including Eugene Labiche and Raymond Chandler.

Urs Widmer now lives and works in Zurich.