Dark Comedy That Hits ‘Below the Belt’

Richard Dresser’s dark, sardonic corporate comedy “Below the Belt” is aptly named.

Hitting below the belt is off-limits in boxing. But the brutality of one man punching another until someone is knocked unconscious is a pale runner-up to the corporate world, where the means justify the end--and the meaner the means, the better.

The show was a hit at the 1995 Humana Festival in Louisville, Ky., and opened off-Broadway last year. Now in a very sharp and funny production at the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage, this three-person play elicited a lot of laughter, much of it with sighs of recognition, on opening night.

Dobbitt (eager, fresh-faced Michael Louden) is the new guy on the block, walking with wide-eyed wonder into the gray nameless compound where he’s assigned to check some obscure product that never gets identified. He meets his co-worker Hanrahan (Robert Foxworth) and ultimately his supervisor, Merkin (Alan Oppenheimer).

Hanrahan, a seething, hostile, angry mess of scrunched shoulders, tics and zinging one-liners (dazzlingly delivered by Foxworth) won’t give Dobbitt or anyone else an inch.

“You must be Hanrahan,” Dobbitt says, extending his hand with a smile.

“Why must I be Hanrahan?” he says, his hands defiantly at his sides. And finally, when he concedes to being Hanrahan, it is grudging. “All right, I’m Hanrahan. But not because it suits your purposes.”

No wonder his last co-worker committed suicide.

But Hanrahan has nothing on the more insidious manipulation of Merkin, played with a gloriously understated, controlled smirk by Oppenheimer. Merkin plays one off the other mercilessly. Merkin is, as Hanrahan puts it, “a malignant, two-faced bottom feeder.” His brain “has a mind of its own.” “Merkin is Merkin and never the twain shall meet.”

And yet there are opportunities to step back and see that Merkin is just a small, paranoid cog in a larger machine that in turn manipulates him ruthlessly.

Dresser’s world conjures up Mamet, but his people are smarter and funnier, with Dilbert-like one-liners. There is also a claustrophobic “No Exit” quality to their entrapment in Kent Dorsey’s nightmarishly gray set. The chain-link fences on the four walls behind the audience in this theater in the round cleverly include the patrons into the prison-like feel.

Andrew J. Traister’s fast and funny direction is incisive at bringing out the nuances between the laughs in a world where, as Hanrahan puts it, “the years hurry by. It’s the days that last an eternity.”

Marianna Elliott’s costumes blend in with Dorsey’s set with standard issue gray slacks and blue blazers. Jeff Ladman’s sound has that terrific popping sound that underscores the offbeat humor.

The only real weakness is the ending, which is interesting but lacks the punch of the whole. And then there is the oddity of the men typing on typewriters rather than keyboards, which would seem to date things.

It’s peculiar, because in all other ways this play reads like a time capsule, a crisp photograph of how the man in the gray flannel suit lives today.

* ‘Below the Belt,” Old Globe Theatre, Cassius Carter Centre Stage, Balboa Park, San Diego. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; Saturdays/Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends June 15. $22-$39. (619) 239-2255. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.

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‘Below the Belt,”

Robert Foxworth: Hanrahan

Michael Louden: Dobbitt

Alan Oppenheimer: Merkin

An Old Globe Theatre production of Richard Dresser’s play. Directed by Andrew J. Traister. Sets and lights: Kent Dorsey. Costumes: Marianna Elliott. Sound: Jeff Ladman. Stage manager: Raul Moncada.