Is a hedge fund manager human? This play says no

A scene from "Instructions to Any Socialist Government Wishing to Abolish Christmas"

To begin with a compliment, playwright Michael Mackenzie certainly knows how to grab an audience's attention.

First of all, there's the tantalizing title of his new play, Instructions to Any Future Socialist Government Wishing To Abolish Christmas, which has made the rounds on Twitter of late. Then there's its exhilarating opening, in which hedge fund manager Jason (Ted Dykstra) throws his laptop to the ground, picks up a baseball bat and smashes it to smithereens.

It's early one morning in September 2008, you see. And though there is a punching bag hanging in the corner of Jason's penthouse office (handsomely designed by James Lavoie), the collapse of Lehman Brothers has clearly called for a more cathartic form of stress release.

Jason's computer crash is interrupted by the arrival of Cass (Gemma James-Smith), a financial analyst who comes bearing a folder filled with more bad news.

Borderline autistic, which, this being fiction, means she's extremely awkward but a genius with numbers, Cass left Jason's employ after an "episode" that will, of course, only be clarified at the play's climax.

In the meantime, Jason must convince Cass to help him come up with a plan to save his hedge fund before the sun rises outside his floor-to-ceiling windows. The only collapse Cass wants to discuss, however, is her recent mental meltdown.

Instructions To Any Future Socialist Government Wishing To Abolish Christmas is, as the title aptly illustrates, a wordy piece of work - it's like an Aaron Sorkin script on cocaine, rewritten by David Mamet on crack.

Cass, who is following a 12-step program to sanity suggested by her therapist, is the more verbose of the two characters - though we are told she was mute about anything but math before the breakdown that the two artificially avoid talking about.

Jason, currently going through his third divorce, is nearly as much of a chatterbox. He particularly enjoys expounding on the relics of Christian saints and ancient philosophers and playwrights. His love of Greek tragedy is unsurprisingly also shared by Mackenzie, who structures his 80-minute play to follow the unities of time, place and action, and gives it a Sophoclean twist at the end.

Alternating between profanity and profundity, Instructions expertly interrogates such financial phenomena as the Gaussian copula and so-called terrorist bonds that became notorious during and after the crisis.

But Mackenzie, a frequent collaborator with Robert Lepage, rarely leaves enough room for these ideas to breathe, and for most of the play he treats the audience like Jason treats his laptop. Rather than expressing a few concepts clearly, he unleashes a barrage of facts, figures and financial jargon. All this intellectual shock and awe may occasionally be dazzling, but what's the point if the audience ultimately leaves unenlightened?

Crow's Theatre artistic director Chris Abrahams' production is so snappy it should come with a whiplash warning. But it also is too realistic to be believable.

What I mean by that is: Mackenzie's overloaded dialogue and one-dimensional characters are clearly exaggerations - and, placed in Lavoie's photo-realistic environment, their artifice is awkwardly apparent. A more abstract take or stylized setting might, counter-intuitively, have helped make the play more plausible, as with, say, Lucy Prebble's recent West End hit Enron, which used dinosaurs and dance numbers to tackle corporate malfeasance.

On the human level, Instructions misses the mark as well. Cavalierly expressing Darwinian disdain for human rights, Jason is too much of a capitalist caricature for us to care about. Cass, meanwhile, is a bundle of tics that don't add up to a human - though that, to be fair, seems to be the intention. Both Dykstra and James-Smith give performances of great intensity, but playwright and director have essentially saddled them with the same angry and anxious emotion throughout. For a play about a tumultuous time, Instructions holds awfully steady.

Instructions to Any Future Socialist Government Wishing to Abolish Christmas