Alexis
Soloski

September 3, 2014

Anyone who took a bath in the 2008 economic crisis might feel a little nervous crossing the water to Governors Island to witness that dunking all over again. In Trade Practices, the director Kristin Marting and the designer David Evans Morris transform Pershing Hall, a handsome former administrative building, into the headquarters of Tender Inc. Resourceful, whimsical and wearing, this participatory production places you in the offices and on the factory floor of a thriving (and then foundering) business to explore questions of investment and value. A paper company established before the Revolutionary War, Tender Inc. makes greeting cards, stationery and the cotton-linen blend on which United States currency is printed. Over the course of the show, Tender is transformed from a family-owned concern into a publicly traded corporation into a housing bubble casualty. There are also sword fights, song-and-dance numbers and terrible French accents. After an introductory video, the audience divides into four groups. Each catches a different scene in a different room by a different writer — Erin Courtney and Qui Nguyen among them. One group sits with the company’s owners, another with its va-va-voom communications director (Jenniffer Diaz), another with its garrulous foreman (Daniel Kublick) and the last with a couple of middle managers.