HUMANS, BEST BE ON YOUR AVANT-GARDE
The Employees, originally produced at Studio Teatrgaleria in Warsaw, is a visionary performance and installation work by Polish-born artist, writer and director Łukasz Twarkowski, who masterfully blends theater, visual art, and cinema. Tonight’s North American premiere, playing through Saturday at NYU Skirball—unfolds across the vast expanse of the stage, in a scale rarely witnessed at this venue.
Running 2 hours and 40 minutes, The Employees creates an extravagant, immersive avant-garde theatrical event. At the heart of Fabien Lédé’s scenography is a monumental two-story cube—a 36-square-meter structure that dominates center stage. Its upper-level doubles as a wrap-around screen, projecting filmed segments, English subtitles (for the Polish dialogue), and live images captured by two roaming camera operators (Iwo Jabłoński and Gloria Grunig)—a technique familiar to audiences of recent productions of Sunset Boulevard and The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Most of the action occurs inside this maze-like cube, which, throughout four acts and three brief 3-minute breaks, is gradually deconstructed to reveal more of its inner workings. Twarkowski extends audience seating on both stage right and left of the cube, dissolving the traditional audience-performer divide. With general admission seating and no fixed spots, viewers are encouraged to roam: moving at your whim, sitting onstage or against the back wall, changing seats or even peeking inside the cube. Perhaps most startling, audience members are invited to record the performance freely on their phones, except during scenes with nudity.
Adapted from the Danish novel by Olga Ravn, The Employees imagines life aboard a spaceship governed by “the Organization,” where six workers—three human, three humanoid—carry out their duties (“jobs that they love”). The cast gives no obvious physical cues as to who is human and who is humanoid; only their names, projected above, offer distinction. The acting is very small and real, camera ready, and amplified. The players are Dominika Biernat, Daniel Dobosz, Maja Pankiewicz, Sonia Roszczuk, Paweł Smagała, and Rob Wasiewicz.
The narrative begins slowly, as we observe the employees performing daily duties and observations. Conflict creeps in gradually: first, a human, annoyed with a humanoid, powers her down. When she is reactivated four minutes later, she remembers being turned off—and for how long! The other humans are shocked that this is possible. Such moments punctuate the otherwise hypnotic rhythm of life aboard the ship, where the humans’ yearning for Earth—the aroma of grass, the smell of a baby’s skin—slowly intensifies, threatening the fragile order.
Lubomir Grzelak’s grand, ominous score amplifies the sense of foreboding, as does the relentless roaming through the cube’s labyrinthine corridors. Bartosz Nalazek’s lighting design is a standout: vertical fluorescent bulbs flicker in pulsating greens and reds, strobing and dazzling as if conjuring an artificial dreamscape (no gummies required). A particularly inventive sequence arrives when the lights—house lights included—“speak” to one another, earning the evening’s only audible laughs.
For those craving a clearer narrative, a final description scrolls by on screen, spelling out the fate of the ship’s inhabitants. It’s a grim epilogue to an otherwise languorous, self-important journey. While some audience members may have been grateful for the freedom to move around, the true devotees—those attuned to avant-garde performance, Stanley Kubrick’s clinical visions, or the speculative writings of Stanisław Lem—will likely be transported.
In the end, The Employees is less a play than an environment, an experience. It demands patience, openness, and a willingness to drift. For those who can surrender, it offers a haunting meditation on labor, humanity, and longing.
photos by Julie Artacho
The Employees
NYU Skirball, 566 LaGuardia Place at Washington Square
150 minutes
ends on April 26, 2025
for tickets ($65), call 212.998.4941 or visit NYU Skirball
Gregory Fletcher is an author, a theater professor, a playwright, director, and stage manager. His craft book on playwriting is entitled Shorts and Briefs, and publishing credits include two YA novels (Other People’s Crazy, and Other People’s Drama), 2 novellas in the series Inclusive Bedtime Stories, 2 short stories in The Night Bazaar series, and several essays. Website, Facebook, Instagram.
