Still, as with Job, we are left to wonder why Michael – and by extension the audience – is subjected to such cruelty. He has self-destructive personal problems, character flaws and off-putting attitudes.
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The escalation between Michael and Ted is true enough to New York living to be at times almost amusing.īut it turns ugly and surreal, one of a series of such excessively brutal reversals and betrayals that one could liken Michael to a modern-day Job (which Bradshaw adapted for The Flea several years ago.) But there is one crucial difference: Michael is not the completely upright and blameless figure of the Biblical Job.
Ted refuses to curb his daughter’s behavior nor put down the carpeting that is required by condo association rules. In a problem that many, many New Yorkers will find familiar, Michael’s perfect new apartment (albeit a bit small and overpriced) turns out to be downstairs from unpleasant neighbor Ted (Jeff Biehl), whose young daughter likes to stomp on the floor at 5 in the morning. It would be a spoiler to go into much detail, but one example is such a classic New York story that it’s hard to resist mentioning. “Fulfillment” is a chronicle of one man’s relentless descent into hell on earth. It soon becomes clear that the very steps Michael has taken to find greater happiness result in the opposite. If Bradshaw’s signature X-rated touches feel gratuitous in “Fulfillment,” the play is nevertheless fulfilling in many ways– a well-acted (bravely acted!), smoothly directed, smart, at times funny, more often horrifying and ultimately thought-provoking glimpse into our pursuit of happiness.Īs the play begins, Michael (Gbenga Akinnagbe), a well-paid senior associate at a law firm where he has been working for nine years, is about to buy a hip new condo apartment in Soho, and has started an affair with a younger colleague at the office, Sarah (Susannah Flood), which he describes to his best friend Simon (Christian Conn) in lecherous detail.
“Fulfillment” presents the most graphic sex scenes I have ever seen on a New York stage, with the exception of the last Bradshaw play I saw, “Intimacy,” which focused on amateur pornographers in the suburbs. Bradshaw doesn’t just use four-letter words, he asks the actors to enact them. So explicit and vulgar are Bradshaw’s plays that they make even the foulest moments in Mamet feel like a scene from The Odd Couple. Just mentioning Bradshaw and Capote in the same sentence might cause the universe to implode. “Fulfillment,” Thomas Bradshaw’s latest in-your-face play, which has opened at the Flea, offers much the same ironic moral lesson as the inspiration behind “Answered Prayers,” the title Truman Capote used for his posthumously published novel: “Answered prayers,” the saying goes, “cause more tears than those that remain unanswered.” Gbenga Akinnagbe and Susannah Flood in “Fulfillment.”