My Manana Comes Review: NYC’s Restaurant Exploitation Dramatized

The four busboys who work in the kitchen of a tony Upper East Side restaurant in the well-acted, superbly directed new play by Elizabeth Irwin, My Manana Comes, bring home a cruel irony of the $30 billion New York City restaurant industry that employs about one out of every 10 New Yorkers: Many restaurant workers can barely afford to feed themselves.* Wages are low – restaurants are required to pay their tipped workers just $2.13 an hour, based on the assumption that the tips will provide the needed full income. But tipped workers are reportedly twice as likely as the average worker to live in poverty. Their jobs are also rarely secure. My Manana Comes, produced by the Playwrights Realm theater company at the Peter Sharp Theater, is no didactic tract on the exploitation of restaurant workers. It is a spot-on recreation of the “back of house” of a fancy restaurant – right down to the totally convincing set by Wilson Chin – where the four men in black Nehru jackets fold linen, fill baskets with bread and buckets with ice, deliver the plates of food and return with the dirty dishes, in a ballet of efficiency. While working, they talk, and over the course of a summer we get to know them.