Reviewed by Martin Denton

Pick Up Ax, by Anthony Clarvoe, tells the story of two young men at the helm of a Silicon Valley software company in the early 1980s. Brian Weiss is the front-man, a savvy but principled MBA who is being eaten alive (literally: he has an ulcer) by the cutthroat world of emerging high-tech business. His partner, Keith Rienzi, is the company's resident genius and bread-and-butter: a wired eccentric who pads around the office in his socks, banging on keyboards in search of inspiration for his next great idea. Brian and Keith are in crisis: their suppliers are no longer cooperating with them, Brian is having serious difficulties with his Board of Directors, and Keith appears to be at least momentarily blocked. Suddenly and out of the blue, a stranger named Mick Palomar shows up, ready to apply some age-old but not very pretty strategies (e.g., extortion) to give our boys the upper hand. A power struggle inevitably ensues: who is going to end up on top?

Pick Up Ax had its New York premiere seven years ago, six years after it was written; it probably already felt dated by 1996, at the dawn of the Internet Age, with its young techno-geek heroes playing decidedly low-tech adventure games, carrying on about "Dungeons and Dragons," and looking for the Next Big Thing in mood-reflecting software.

Today, it's almost a period piece, but—particularly as brilliantly paired by Alex Roe with another business-themed melodrama eighty years older (Clyde Fitch's)—it can teach us some things about our collective history and collective psyche that more topical fare cannot. The Fitch play, in which a striving robber baron faced imminent ruin when some scandalous affairs, some business-related, some not, came to light, reminded us that there used to be a moral code that operated, if not in the real world of commerce, then at least within our idealized manifestations of them on stage.

Pick Up Ax reveals how distant such ideals now seem. Its protagonist—far from feeling heat, let alone compunction, for swimming with (past) a school of very nasty sharks—is rewarded for his less-than-ethical actions; and not just in the outcome of the plot, mind you: we actually kind of like and admire this guy, in spite of the fact that—or, more disturbingly, maybe because—we recognize in him the soulless signposts of our recent Age of Greed. Sure, one of the high-powered wannabe executives in this play says, regarding a move that will cause a swift and certain reduction in their company's stock price, "We need to protect the interests of our shareholders." But it seems to me that the almost quaint quality of that speech—which presumably would have choked Ken Lay—is precisely at the heart of Roe's intention here: how much does our world, which has yet to prosecute robber barons far more brazen than Fitch's, admire and reward the wrong sorts of behavior?

Clarvoe turns out to be somewhat prescient in one other way: his genius-turned-CEO realizes, near the end of the play, that the Next Big Thing isn't software at all, or at least not software that does something. Pick Up Ax ends, ominously, with what sounds like a conspiracy theorist's worst nightmare of the birth of the now-commonplace computer virus.

There are inconsistencies and imperfections in the script that suggest that Clarvoe hasn't spent a great deal of time working in a large corporation; and his unwillingness (or inability) to reconcile the more fantastical elements of his play (such as Palomar's almost supernatural appearance in Brian's office—for a while, I thought he was supposed to be Mephistopheles) is jarring. But Roe's staging, glossing over these problems, lets us focus on the message, at least some of which may by the way be unintentional. His Pick Up Ax turns out to be a valuable document of recent history, at the very least a source of real food for thought.

David Gentile Fraioli steals the show as the wizardly Keith, winning us over first with his inspired eccentricity and later with his unexpectedly grounded savvy. Brian Hotaling partners Fraioli well as the more centered and more conflicted Brian. John Ottavino is perhaps more menacing than he needs to be as Palomar.