#workplace-satire

#workplace-satire

Profile Theatre's Tiger Style is the best bargain to be found right now in Portland theater. You buy a ticket to a comedy and get-as a free bonus-a dazzling array of vignettes dissecting Asian American education, life, relationships, and myths. It's giving a side eye to corporate life, showing how families break up and make up, and offering biting examples of Communist Party of China (CPC) politics. Such a deal!

When it comes to director Sam Raimi's films, you have to go into the theater understanding that you're about to experience a piece of cinema that vacillates between being absolute batshit and utterly sublime. Though Send Help is much more grounded than the projects he's best known for, like The Evil Dead or Drag Me to Hell, it's a quintessential Raimi film that makes no pretense of hiding how unhinged and disturbing its story is going to be.

The world of "The Chair Company," by contrast, is full of characters who possess their own sparks of Robinsonian madness, their own humiliations and self-defeating obsessions. There is the older colleague who was passed over for Ron's job, played by the veteran "S.N.L." writer Jim Downey: following his non-promotion, he makes it his business to enliven the workplace-first by blowing bubbles with a wand he wears around his neck, then by throwing a party.