Ghosts of Business Ideas by Bailey Williams

I used to babysit these two kids in Cobble Hill. Sometimes when we were sitting on the couch, watching a twelve year old un-box free cosmetics on Youtube, one of them would turn to me and say, “Bailey, what do you want to be when you grow up?” At the time, I was 28 years old.

As I watched the final dress of Milo Cramer’s kinetic, impish comedy Business Ideas, this memory resurfaced, among many others. The American Theater is full of ghosts who return to tell the audience what we know, but would rather forget. It’s entirely apt that in the first few minutes of this play, a spotlight hits a barista named Patty— our first ghost— as she disassociates from yet another Customer and speaks à la Prince Hamlet. “O, me” she says, “why must I have experiences?”

It’s a joke but also of course, as anyone who has ever stood behind a counter can tell you, it isn’t.

Business Ideas unfolds through a series of episodic encounters set in a coffee shop, or rather a spooky echo of the coffee shop, all mint green and monstera. The episodes toggle between Patty and a series of chameleonic Customers, and a mother-daughter duo named Georgina and Lisa. These two are engaged in an early morning brainstorm on how to afford Lisa’s college tuition after Georgina’s recent firing from Starbucks Corporate (the titular “business ideas”). The play is shaped like a chain of interlocking circles, a kind of ouroboros with a buh-dum-tsh stinger. A fitting structural pathway for examining work in a world that fundamentally doesn’t really… work.

Lisa and Georgina are haunted by another ghost: the thought that they could “get rich at any moment.” What mysterious combination of buzzword and object equal wealth? Crepe cart? DMV photo retake? Uber for hugs? The ideas come fast, but something isn’t adding up. But why
not? It did for Lisa’s friend (also a Customer), who connected “sustainable cashmere farmers with gen z influencers who have overcome depression.” And it did for Georgina’s friend (another Customer), who “outta nowhere,” got bumped to $200K just for sitting around.

Meanwhile, Patty serves a carousel of more Customers. There’s a therapist, an administrative assistant, a detective, a surgeon, a youth pastor, a philanthropist… and they all, almost without exception, resonate strangely against the frequency of their employment. The therapist is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, the detective is a Juicy Couture ditz, the philanthropist is ungenerous. We know that a person is not their job but when we laugh at each reveal, the expectation deferred… doesn’t this suggest what our expectations truly are? And if so, what does this say about our understanding of Patty? We never know her as anything but a barista. The claustrophobia of her worldview — that she is her job but she hates her job and therefore she has failed — is also the claustrophobia of the play. We can’t really know Patty while we are stuck inside a paradigm that ties selfhood and value so explicitly to work.

Oh no! And that’s capitalism! And it’s inside me!!!!!!!!*

Patty wonders what she’s missing, how she failed to learn the rules when actually, she grasps them perfectly. “Your words control my body,” she notes, with growing hysteria, “When you order, my body has to move.” “That’s normal,” a Customer says. Lots of things are normal! To be destitute, to be sad, a kitchen, a Subaru, days off, two babies, and a new phone. For example.

Patty quits, despite a cascade of positive Yelp reviews. Lisa, in a moment of clarity, sees the close of the circle. There is no escape and the matrix is all around us and time will loop around until she becomes Patty, so Lisa quits too! She quits business ideas, she quits to be with the worker who makes 30 cents a day! She quits with all the conviction of a teenager seeing, for the first time, the violence in her $12 green juice. She quits like someone who doesn’t really have anything to quit yet, for whom quitting does not yet have consequences.

The next moment, Patty, somehow un-quit, is back at her job training Ruth, the final
metamorphosis of the Customer. Patty, aghast, watches Ruth as she has a perfectly lovely interaction with a Customer, who is also herself. The job doesn’t bother Ruth, not the way it bothers Patty. “No type of work is better or worse than any other type of work,” Ruth repeats like a mantra. And she knows. She was once a truck driver, a coal miner, a frontline soldier in a meaningless war. The line between the Customer and the consumed is indeed paper thin. The person on the other side of the counter— the one who has transmuted the alchemical rules that govern us into gold— she’s just another idea. She’s a ghost.

* See Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life for further reading.