Jordan Bellow, Susannah Perkins, and Dee Pelletier in Not Not Jane’s. Photo: Maria Baranova

Clubbed Thumb’s mission is to present funny, strange, and provocative new plays by living American writers, all of them packing their considerable punches in under 90 minutes. These last few seasons, though, the humor sometimes feels like the last line of defense against existential dread: plays that use lightly heightened language and crackerjack pacing and finely calibrated absurdity as tools to peel back the surface of late-capitalist despair and see what it’s made of. This is obviously true of Business Ideas, the first show in the 2025 Summerworks season, but it’s also very much the undercurrent (and sometimes the explicit theme) of Mara Nelson-Greenberg’s Not Not Jane’s, entry number two. Everyone in it is floundering over their place in the world–professional, financial, and/or emotional, but the thrum of anxiety over jobs and student loans and the moral compromises that can come with working for evil billionaires is virtually constant. (The only character free of financial anxiety was “lucky” enough to get hit by a city bus; more to come on that.) 

Not Not Jane’s has a lot of Christopher Durang in its DNA—its rocketing straight through absurdity without taking a breath, its warped psychodrama of family somehow made screamingly funny, even the way seemingly one-off lines mushroom back as later, bigger jokes. There are times when Greenberg and director Joan Sergay stray from the manic intensity of the tone–but not many. Tone really is everything here, and it goes a very long way, because the minute you stop to think about any of these characters for too long, you realize the fragility of the goals and bonds that are keeping them going. 

Jane (Susannah Perkins), our hero, has moved back in with her loose-cannon mother, Cheryl (Dee Pelletier), to help with a family crisis–which means she’s lost her job. Cheryl’s two default emotional modes are over-enmeshment (capped off by prurient oversharing with anyone who might be a friend/lover of Jane’s) and mild martyrdom (berating her daughter for not helping enough to get her brother, Brian, out of a hole. Literal, not metaphorical; the never seen Brian is digging in the yard). In an effort to get a little money coming in and maybe also do a little bit of good in the world, Jane has applied for a community grant that includes a stipend from the Matt Fund—Matt being an ethically challenged billionaire who publicized the award so poorly that it only got two applicants. Matt’s grant officer/unpaid therapist/assistant, Theresa (Sue Jean Park), has come to help Jane with her proposal. Which is chairs. Just chairs: a public place to rest. Because, Jane says, have you noticed that there are no chairs anymore in parks or bus stations or plazas?

Problem 1: Cheryl. Problem 2: The grant doesn’t fund space, so the whole thing will have to happen in Jane’s bedroom. (Corey Umlauf’s set brings cheerful realism; Marika Kent’s lighting and Johnny Gasper’s sound take us to a slightly more ominous place in scene transitions.) Problem 3: Matt is more interested in funding a coffee shop—or at least an entrepreneurial enterprise that’s not not a coffee shop—than actual philanthropy that serves the public. Problem 4: Theresa is more interested in proving herself to Matt than in helping Jane realize her actual vision. Problem 5: Does Jane actually have a vision? 

Meanwhile, in the interest of getting away from Cheryl, Jane’s looking for love on the app Meant to Be Convenient, which pairs people based on how close together they live and what shows they like to watch. She and Malcolm (Jordan Bellow) don’t really have a lot in common or a lot of time to spend together, and also he wants to read Infinite Jest, but he’s better than Cheryl’s con man ex Mark (Sam Breslin Wright), who’s just looking for a hobby while he waits for Satan to take over. And then there’s George (Yonatan Gebeyehu), a food delivery guy/handyman/actor/concierge who becomes embedded in the process of getting Jane’s not not coffee shop up and running. 

 Under the silliness—and it’s very silly and very funny, executed with impeccable timing by Sergay and the excellent cast—lies that maw of anxieties, though: Cheryl and Brian aren’t bringing in any income, and Jane’s grant stipend only goes so far (if Matt even makes good on the funds). Theresa is working for a monster to pay off her student loans, and at the same time not really making enough to make up for working for a monster. Mark is a freeloader and con artist, who, on top of bonding with Satan, just keeps getting catfished and is now back to try to extract more money out of Cheryl, which is really Jane’s money, most of which is going toward trying to bribe Brian to come out of the hole anyway. George needs a four-dimensional calendar to keep track of all his gigs, and is using his acting chops mostly to fake the knowledge necessary to pull off eighty percent of his tasks.

The only character who’s financially secure is Malcolm: he got hit by that city bus, sued successfully, and now he’s set for life. Except for the humiliation of being dragged pantsless across town; losing half an ear; memory-lapse seizures; and the fact that the bus is still parked halfway inside his house. (He’s spending a lot of time at Jane and Theresa’s.) Financial security isn’t everything, but it’s still better than what the rest of them have.

Bellow and Perkins need to ground the ensemble here, and they do it beautifully, Malcolm doggedly moving forward in the direction of his choosing–he’s the one who’s economically secure enough to make his own choices–while Jane keeps getting trapped between the competing needs of others, every flicker of frustration showing on her face even as she tries to navigate diplomatically to her goal. (Perkins does a lot of Summerworks shows and has absolutely mastered the particular demands of their language and style; they’re perhaps the paradigmatic Clubbed Thumb actor: emotionally and linguistically precise, master of a deadpan comic delivery paired with an expressive face whose unsaid emotions can be read almost as clearly as the verbalized ones.) Pelletier is another standout, with a loopy narcissistic obliviousness that’s both maddening and hilarious.

At its finest, Not Not Jane’s wins with both dumb jokes and clever ones. A gag about a drill that sounds like farting gets delightfully beaten into the ground (and that’s not the only piece of wit arising from Johnny Gasper’s sound design, a compliment I’ve now given Gasper on two successive projects). A ridiculous interlude takes a throwaway line about Jane’s competitor for the grant, a porn film with no sex, and spins out its possibilities. Everyone picks up on Theresa’s habit of saying “beep” instead of cursing until they’re all beeping with all the intensity the curse would have. Gebeyehu delivers George’s list of every word you should not say in the workplace with ferocious glee.

And Greenberg knows how to keep looping a joke until its surreality becomes part of the laugh: Malcolm finding piece after piece of bus in his luggage. Mark’s casual study of Satanish. The running series of things that are “not not” something else. That surreality quotient keeps amping up until we break through into a literal alternative universe: a better version of the Communal Chairs where Not-Jane and Not-Theresa and maybe even the long-lost Not-Brian can find a second chance.

The multiverse solution can often feel like a retcon copout, and there’s a little of that going on here: it’s not that the tenderer emotions and the bits of hope that are revealed don’t exist throughout the play, but that landing so squarely in them at the end tips the tone farther toward unadorned sincerity than feels warranted. It’s a little bit of wish fulfillment in a play that, for all its humor, had been pretty honest about the ethical and psychic compromises that come with twenty-first-century capitalist adulthood. I want that emotional resolution for the characters, but I didn’t quite believe the one we got.