Review: In Stefano Massini’s ‘7 Minutes,’ It’s Make or Break

Though based on real events, “7 Minutes,” produced by Waterwell in association with Working Theater, is a piece of hopeful fantasy. It envisions a roomful of people in profound disagreement. Despite disparities of attitude and background, these people listen, respectfully, to one another’s arguments. In our increasingly partisan society, “7 Minutes” offers a portrait of representative democracy — functional, unmired — in action. Can you believe it?

Written by the Italian playwright Stefano Massini (author of “The Lehman Trilogy”), and translated by Francesca Spedalieri, this American premiere, at HERE, is set at Penrose Mills, a fictional Connecticut textiles factory. New owners, backed by foreign investors, have taken it over. As the play opens, 10 members of the workers’ executive committee, all women and nonbinary employees, are huddled in the break room waiting for news of the new owners’ demands. (The break room — fluorescents and stained paneling above, linoleum below — is designed by You-Shin Chen and lit by Hao Bai, who also provides the ominous sound design.)

After a few increasingly tense minutes, Linda (Ebony Marshall-Oliver), the committee’s spokeswoman — and its 11th member — arrives. The factory will not close, she tells her co-workers. Benefits and salaries will remain stable. But the owners have asked for one small concession: a seven-minute reduction in the employees’ break time. And they require a decision in just over an hour, which means that the debate in the 90-minute play unfolds in real time.

“7 Minutes” is smart. It’s also chilly, as if someone has run the air conditioning at full. And while the documentary framing lends it currency, it can feel familiar. The play, which transposes conflict between management and workers onto conflict between worker and worker, has dramatic antecedents as far back as Clifford Odets’s “Waiting for Lefty” (a drama about unionized cabdrivers so galvanizing that on opening night the audience joined the actors in calls to strike) and as near as Lynn Nottage’s “Sweat” and Dominique Morisseau’s “Skeleton Crew.”

At first Linda’s is the only no vote. But as the play progresses, generational rifts emerge as well as differences of ethnicity and pay rate, and several of the other workers shift to her side. (This makes a work like Reginald Rose’s teleplay “Twelve Angry Men” one more forerunner.) On an individual basis, the concession isn’t onerous. The seven lost minutes themselves don’t really matter, and certainly not when compared with the possibility of layoffs or a lockout. But almost immediately the minutes take on symbolic value: Why should the workers reward the new owners? What precedent would a yes vote set?

Ultimately, the vote becomes a referendum on freedom, a mostly abstract concept, and the security of a steady paycheck.

Linda’s fiercest opponent, Danielle (Danielle Davenport), needs to keep her medical insurance. She has no time for abstraction. “Do you want to start a fight because of your doubts?” Danielle asks.

Linda replies, “And do you want to keep the peace, no matter the cost, because of your fears?”

Massini has an obvious interest in capitalist systems and the ways in which they can deform individuals and societies. In this production, directed by Mei Ann Teo, ideas dominate, with character consistently subordinated to debate. This is partly a problem of translation. The real conflict on which the play is based took place in a French factory. Massini moved it to Italy. Waterwell’s version uproots it to Connecticut, but without any real feeling of place or circumstance. It could be anywhere.

The language is oddly formal (“May they all die,” “If 10 think red, the 11th must blush”) and largely undifferentiated among the characters, who are given only the thinnest carapace of background. The stronger actors — Marshall-Oliver and Davenport among them — can fill in these blanks, but the weaker ones struggle to flesh out the women and nonbinary workers behind the words.

This renders “7 Minutes” a play that makes you think. But in contrast to Nottage’s and Morisseau’s works, which consistently ground the political within the individual, it is never one that makes you feel. Democracy without emotion? That’s a fantasy, too.

7 Minutes
Through April 10 at HERE, Manhattan; here.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.