How Café Utopia Serves Up Responsibly-Sourced Union Drama

How do you write a union play that doesn’t end in everyone yelling “Strike! Strike! Strike!"? That was one of the questions on playwright Gwen Kingston’s mind as she drafted Café Utopia, a Notch Theatre project about contemporary unionization movements that premiered at the Hudson Guild Theater in New York City in November 2024. Kingston’s question references Clifford Odetts’s 1935 Waiting for Lefty, perhaps the most iconic example of the rich tradition of American union drama in which Café Utopia participates. Lefty, a heavy, episodic drama based on the 1934 New York City cab driver labor stoppage, ends with the ensemble deciding to strike for better working conditions and passionately chanting “Strike!” Almost ninety years later, Notch began to answer Kingston’s question right where it always does: by asking the communities doing the work of social change.

Notch Theatre Company, led by artistic director Ashley Olive Teague, practices what it calls community-responsive theatre. The specifics of the methodology adapt from project to project, but the commonality is that Notch partners with individuals and organizations in communities that have a story to tell that isn’t being told in mainstream theatrical venues and works with them to help tell it. Usually, these projects are strongly rooted in a specific place: Wild Home amplifies the stories of communities in Appalachia, Alaska, and Colorado facing down fossil fuel development, and Remember 2019 is enmeshed with the Black communities in the Arkansas Delta, supporting local practices of self-determination, memory, and healing related to the mass lynching of 1919.

Because Café Utopia is focused on the unionization efforts within corporate behemoths like Starbucks, Amazon, and Home Depot, this project breaks from Notch’s history of place-based storytelling to capture a truly national story. The process began with a series of interviews with workers and union organizers from across the country who have experience working within these megacorporations. Those interviews served as the foundation and inspiration for Kingston’s writing, as well as the process of workshopping the play. Because Notch is invested in telling stories that express the truth of their community partners’ experiences, the relationship does not end after the interviews have been conducted. At a workshop table read in New York in early 2024, community members watched via Zoom and provided feedback on the draft. Those who couldn’t log on provided feedback on a recording. When the play ran at Hudson Guild, Notch provided transportation and lodging for community members to see the show and speak directly with audiences. The rich, long-term relationships that the theatre collective cultivates with local communities serve as the foundation of the work it creates, and that process is at least as important as the play that ultimately gets performed. The method of creating Café Utopia served as a reminder that making theatre, unionization, and positive social change are all fundamentally relational, and that investing time and resources into relationships is an act of resistance under an economic system that values individuality and competition over all else.

The play is set in a fictional juicery, the titular Café Utopia, that echoes and satirizes real-life drink-based international corporations, complete with shockingly expensive beverages and snacks, over-the-top product naming conventions, and a vaguely cultlike interior design by scenic and costume designer Calypso Michelet. At first glance, Café Utopia feels like a standard workplace drama with a cast of complex characters whose intertwined relationships one might expect to drive the plot: Ari (Al Piper) is a longtime employee whose aspirations of advancement and friendships with the other employees are hampered by their partner’s controlling behavior; Bex (Julia Atwood) is the bright-eyed new girl who wants to be friends with everyone while working her way through classes at the local college; Carlos (Louis Reyes McWilliams and Nayib Felix) is a lovable goof who mostly wants to be a musician but works at Café Utopia to help pay his mother’s medical bills; Enzo (Sergio Mauritz Ang) is a mysterious, silent presence with no lines, though he is occasionally overheard doing whippets in the stockroom; and they are all led by their fearless manager Dee (Kathleen Mary Carthy), who brings the same energy to running her store as she does to coaching the local youth Muay Thai team. Together, they run a store whose “Mission is to heal, nourish, and uplift our customers and communities, one drink at a time,” where “everyone is welcome.”

The play uses a constellation of dramaturgical techniques to show that contemporary national and international corporations like the ones Café Utopia critiques create empty, superficial relationships between the “brand” and the customers and employees.

As the play progresses, cracks begin to emerge in the facade of Café Utopia that suggest that all may not be as it seems, and a slightly sketchy Union Guy (Ang) starts talking to Bex, causing tension among the staff. The play uses a constellation of dramaturgical techniques to show that contemporary national and international corporations like the ones Café Utopia critiques create empty, superficial relationships between the “brand” and the customers and employees, while also enacting policies that undermine the possibility of deep, meaningful relationships among their employees as a way of suppressing collective action against exploitation.

Given the subject matter and the history of serious, dramatic union plays like Lefty, perhaps the most surprising strategy that Utopia uses is comedy. Indeed, the play is funny throughout, and the butt of the joke is usually corporate capitalism. Each time a customer places an order, the audience learns another of the absurd names of the fare on offer at the café: the “WheatGrassroots Community Uprising Blend,” the “Gluten-Free Yourself from the Grains of Intolerance Panini,” and—an audience favorite on a night when I was in the audience—the “Decolonizer Muffin with American Cheese.” In addition to engaging the audience through laughter, the product names draw attention to the ways in which many large corporations craft their brand to appear socially progressive, appealing to the ideals of customers and potential employees to make them feel better about spending money, time, and labor to support the company. 

Periodically throughout the play, the performers drop their main character to perform verbatim excerpts from the original interviews with workers to ground the satire in real, lived experience. One such monologue demonstrates how corporate virtue signaling only works to ensnare workers from vulnerable populations and obscure the companies’ less-than-progressive actions:

I chose the job because—a lot of it was because of the values. You know what I mean? It was progressive, it was responsibly sourced, we were working on getting rid of preservatives. It was, ideologically, perfect. They were very outwardly looking for queer people. Community was a big word with them. It was just a really warm and fuzzy place. I think that’s what pissed me off so much, later.

The workers at Café Utopia, like many workers at the corporations that play critiques, enter into a relationship with the company with expectations based on how the brand markets itself, and they find themselves in a relationship based on exploitation.

The play also captures a more insidious alienation—the fracture of trusting relationships between employees as a matter of policy.

This bait-and-switch dynamic of purported corporate values and actual practice comes to life most explicitly in Café Utopia in the figure of Damien Lamb (Ang), the deified founder of the miraculous drink company. When Dee tells the staff that Lamb is coming to visit the store, they break into a frenzy, exclaiming about cleaning everything, writing songs for the occasion, and trading rumors about how “the youngest self-made billionaire in the world” discovered the secret ingredient for the drinks on a niche yoga retreat in the rainforests of Bali, in the swamps of Louisiana where he may or may not have grown up, or on a trip to space with his billionaire pals. One of the biggest laughs in the show comes when Lamb fails to show up for the visit because “Something came up at the production facility in Peru,” and Carlos—whose anticipation of meeting Lamb reminds one of a puppy anticipating a treat—fights back tears and stammers, “Well, I guess if—you know, Peru needs him. Man—I bet the social media feed is going to be incredible. Put that guy in front of some ruins!”

The humor in this dynamic comes from the recognition of the imbalance in the relationship between the workers who make the company function and the boss whose name and likeness has come to stand in for the company. As much as Dee tries to convince them that the founder is “always excited to meet the newest employees” and that he was “genuinely disappointed” to miss the visit because “he wanted to make sure we know how seriously he takes his commitment to the workers,” there is no real interpersonal connection between these two strata of the company. In fact, we later learn that the real Damien Lamb has not been affiliated with Café Utopia for years, and what Carlos and the others know and love of him is actually a series of Artificial Intelligence-generated images on a social media feed. Lamb’s planned visit was a sham, manipulating the employees’ emotions into working extra hard, cleaning everything, and even risking their safety to ensure that everything ran smoothly on “Damien Day,” with no extra compensation besides the potential to earn his approval. The failure of Lamb to show up for the site visit dramatizes the broken promise of corporate capitalism: corporations say all the right things about social justice and inclusivity, assure workers that they are joining a family with a mission to improve the world, and convince them that hard work will earn them a livable life; but when the time comes to deliver on those promises, something always comes up at the production facility in Peru.

This empty relationship between people and the impersonal machinations of corporate entities is the pinnacle of Karl Marx’s theory of alienation: the idea that capitalism creates unbridgeable distances between workers and the products and impacts of their labor, including how they relate to themselves and others. There is certainly a separation between the Café Utopia workers and the product they are creating: no one knows the secret ingredient in the drinks, and most of the drinks are made with the help of a giant machine center stage whose functioning is “proprietary information” that only the scarce “official techs” of the company are allowed to understand and repair. But the play also captures a more insidious alienation—the fracture of trusting relationships between employees as a matter of policy.

For example, Café Utopia employees are not allowed to talk about the schedule. Ari suggests that the policy is in place because it “makes people uncomfortable” to talk about their hours, but it becomes clear that—as anyone who has worked an irregular hourly job can attest—the schedule is a proxy for power: who gets what shifts, how many hours you work (and therefore your income), the structure of your life outside the job—all these depend on the schedule. If, as is the case at Café Utopia, the manager controls the schedule, and the employees do not talk to each other about it, then it becomes difficult to identify irregularities and inequities in that distribution of power. Café Utopia is somehow always busy and always short staffed, even though everyone seems to want more hours, and Bex can’t get the twenty hours per week she needs to qualify for health insurance. Similarly, Café Utopia has a “buddy system” policy that forbids any employee from being in the store alone—a policy that Ari explains as “being accountable to each other” but that Bex realizes is because “they don’t want us to trust each other. Like, they want to put us in competition, make us police each other.” These friendship-stifling policies, combined with the casual ways in which the company disrupts the characters’ lives outside of work—Bex lives one hour away by transit but has to come in for a 7:00 a.m. staff meeting, even though her shift doesn’t start until 3:00 p.m., so she just stays in the store all day without getting paid—show how corporate America systematically undermines collective action by interrupting the formation of social bonds.

Notch’s long-term relationships with community partners seed relationships between the audience and the community partners, between the audience and the performers, and amongst audience members.

In contrast, the process of making Café Utopia, and the play in its performance context, place the formation of relationships center stage, highlighting the power of live performance to create alternative spaces and values to those policed by corporate America. Notch’s long-term relationships with community partners seed relationships between the audience and the community partners, between the audience and the performers, and amongst audience members. This relationship-building occurs most explicitly in the most experimental part of the performance, about halfway through the play, when the performers drop character and—instead of performing another verbatim monologue—address the audience directly, using their real names, and facilitate conversation between spectators. The facilitator (a rotating responsibility amongst the cast) starts by asking for the audience to raise their hands in response to a series of questions: Who has been in a union? Who has family in a union? Who has had a positive experience with a union? A negative experience? When everyone is warmed up, the facilitator gently invites the audience to turn to someone they don’t know—often acknowledging that this is a horrifying ask—and discuss their experiences with unionization. The rest of the cast passes out juice as incentive. Slowly but surely, people start to talk to each other, and after a few minutes the facilitator asks for highlights of the conversations. The conversation varies from performance to performance depending on who is in the audience. One night that I was there, one of the organizers who contributed an interview was there, and he was able to explicitly connect his experience organizing at Amazon to the events of the play. And then, the play goes on.

This moment is significant because it transforms the audience into a collective: a group of people who are more connected to one another, and to the conflict in the play, than they were before the house lights came up. They are perhaps more likely to use that collectivity for positive social change. Café Utopia audiences are not the passive spectators that Jacques Rancière is working to emancipate, who uncritically consume and incorporate the ideological argument of the play; they are not even the agitated spectator of agit-prop theatre, encouraged to chant “strike” in unison at the play’s close. Instead, I would argue that this moment invites spectators into the more complicated, but perhaps more liberating, space of what Jill Dolan aptly calls a “utopian performative”—moments of “clarity and communion, fleeting, briefly transcendent bits of profound human feeling and connection, spring[ing] from alchemy between performers and spectators and their mutual confrontation with a historical present that lets them imagine a different, putatively better future.” The argument of this play is not that unions are perfect and will fix everything. Indeed, it’s unclear whether or not the workers at Café Utopia decide to unionize or not at the end of the play. The utopia that Café Utopia suggests is a world in which people are empowered to assemble, form meaningful relationships with one another free from the manipulative forces of mega-corporations, and shape their future together.