Do You Feel Anger?

Do You Feel Anger? by Mara Nelson-Greenberg is an absurdist, dark comedy about an empathy coach, Sofia, who struggles to break through to a collection agency's employees after being hired as a consultant to improve their collection calls. The male employees' juvenile and threatening behaviors serves as both the foundation and destruction of Sofia’s complicated camaraderie with Eva, the only present female employee. Sofia fails both in teaching empathy and helping Eva, in fact in her attempt to empathize with the sociopathy of the male employees she loses herself.

In a climactic and surreal ending scene the audience and Sofia finally meet the last woman in the office, Janie, who has been in the bathroom for weeks. Janie’s monologue on the oppressive grind of her work and her snap with reality bring clarity and voice to Eva’s experiences. Sofia walks away from her failures at the collection agency with a glimmer of hope that she may be able to rebuild her relationship with her mother through her own newfound empathy. The story is not only about how men fail women in society, but how those same social structures lead women to fail each other.

Some of the absurd dialogue is played for laughs, but as the plot develops the blunt dialogue turns horrifying. In contrast to the uncomfortably honest dialogue is the purposeful ignorance the characters display. Repeatedly the characters question Sofia’s use of language, butchering nervous into “norvis”, and refuse to enter into any introspection. They see personal development as a box to check, best embodied in Jon. Do You Feel Anger? most pointedly highlights issues of gender, but also the consuming nature of capitalist patriarchy, and the futility of words. I see reflected in the text the struggle of allyship, the unequal work of empathy, and the way language creates power.

The main focus from a director’s perspective is Sofia’s journey of growth which is spurred on by the consuming culture of the collection agency and Eva’s new ability to express her reckoning with the fundamentally f*cked nature of the world. The last scene leaves the audience with a bittersweet note, a beautiful, feminine rebirth that frames living as a form of revolt and resistance. Janie talks through rebuilding her own sense of self, Eva appears as mermaid as she wished to be, and the experience in the bathroom allows Sofia to move forward with her mother.

As society (hopefully) increases to be more gender critical, these discussions are more important as we move beyond an essentialist structure while having to deal with its impact. The collection agency is ‘every office.’