“The Dishwashers” continues through June 7 at 59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street, Manhattan; (212) 279-4200.
Dressler (Tim Donoghue) occupies a particular place in the American psyche, an absence, a toiling mystery in the damp basement of our minds. What is Dressler? “A communist”? “A guy without dreams”? A steward or a victim of fate? According to Dressler, he’s a dishwasher. A dishwasher is, however, according to Dressler something more than a guy who washes dishes.
When Emmett (Jay Stratton) begins his job in the basement of an upscale restaurant he is dejected, only able to remember that he used to eat “up there,” off of the dishes he now cleans. Only aggravating his gloom, Dressler, the head dishwasher, tells him that not only must he aspire to the grand title of Dishwasher but he’s “new guy” until he earns his own name. Emmett, who we are led to assume is a bottomed out broker, is most of the play beside himself with angst. “It’s not that I think that I belong up there,” he tells Dressler later, “but I know that I don’t belong down here.” Indeed, as Emmett spends most of the play mustering his waning aspiration and staving off a settling fatalism, Dressler tells him that that is exactly what’s holding him back, “Aspiration is what’s holding me back?” Emmett bursts superciliously. “Don’t get too big for your britches,” Dressler tells Emmett, whose uniform belongs to the dwarf dishwasher that came before. His grubby britches, ironically, fit Emmett like bicycle shorts. Emmett responds to this kind of thing, often, with an appalled look that grows wearisome as the play drags on.
What is a dishwasher? If Dressler is any example, a dishwasher is “the foundation” of American dining, an essential piece of the puzzle. A dishwasher is also the protector of fortune, like the classical fates. When Dressler notices among the dirty dishes a lost speech, most likely that of an unfortunate orator in a wedding party, he warns the newest “new guy” to leave it there in the bus bin: it is not a dishwasher’s place to alter destiny.
Dishwashers are guardians and perpetuators of their own destiny. Contrary to Emmett’s notions, a dishwasher is not an unfortunate cast away chosen by fate but, according to Dressler, something to aspire to, a title to be earned. A Dishwasher is sustained by knowing the vital role that washing dishes plays in the great drama of cosmos. This great drama, Dressler constantly insists, is nothing at all like the tragedy in which Emmett thinks he stars.
The politics of pleasure are infused throughout “The Dishwashers;” the joy of humble speculation is constantly at odds with material pleasure; higher order thinking heavy handedly juxtaposed with the ethos of extravagance; and destiny is demolished for Dressler’s perverse version of self-determination. I was happy when this play was over.
At the play’s end we are faced with a clear disjunction between pleasure as a negative function of dejection and the pleasure of self hypnosis. Dressler does not see a pile of dishes but an Olympic stadium where judges score the thoroughness, speed, and finesse of his dishwashing. Emmett, as do most audience members, simply sees a pile of dishes and perhaps the terrible hand of fate smacking him for the short comings of his past life. Dressler’s reverence for the forces of the universe, staring up at eternity with dewy eyes from a garbage heap makes us uncomfortable. Like Emmett, we flee from this scene to a secular view of causality which puts human action and determination before fate. This work ethic is the persistent ethos that has under girded American progress since all men were posited equal. That a “dishwasher” like Dressler must jettison this American ethos in order to continue his patriotic toiling in the dingy basement of democracy is perhaps the greatest irony, among the many exhausting ironies, in Morris Panych’s “The Dishwashers.”
SAM
