EDINBURGH 2023: THE TEMP Q&A

BWW caught up with Kristina DeGiovanni and Alexandra Scordato to chat about bringing The Temp to the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Tell us a bit about The Temp.

The Temp is a comedic solo play satirizing modern workplace culture through a different lens than most people might be used to seeing. I play a (debatably) bad, pretentious actor explaining to the audience what went down at her most recent temp job, where she was hired by the CEO of a fictional media agency called “Datapuke” to play a fake employee, in order to inspire rest of the office to be “passionate”, jazzed up “rockstars” like they used to be (aka, before 2020). Needless to say, it doesn’t pan out exactly as they expect! I have a sketch comedy background, so there are a lot of absurdly specific characters that “The Temp” gets to have fun imitating as she tells this crazy story. There’s also that potentially indulgent meta element of myself (the writer), playing an actor, who’s playing this cast of other characters, which is very fun for me as a playwright but ideally also speaks to the play’s themes of performance, identity, and believing in the narratives we make up about ourselves to make it through this hellscape of modern capitalism.

Why bring it to Edinburgh?

At home in New York we’ve taken The Temp from the workshop stage through to initial full runs at 14th St Y, The Tank, and 59E59. We’re now at the stage where we’re ready to put it up in front of new and wider audiences so we can gauge responses, find out what’s hitting, and hone the show with as many reps as we can manage. We’re particularly interested to see if this show’s somewhat distinctly American themes (and jokes) are relatable to Scottish audiences. Bringing a show to the Fringe and workshopping it amongst so many great comedians and performers has always been a dream of mine, so I’m excited by the opportunity to connect with potential collaborators and industry, and get inspired by all the other funny stuff that’s out there.

What inspired the writing of the show?

Since graduating college with my extremely marketable degree in playwriting I spent the past five years working at advertising/digital marketing/etc. agencies in New York (comedy on the side). The modern office setting is obviously rife with inspiration for comedy, for me especially extremely self-serious coworkers and the performativity of “corporate life.” When the pandemic hit, it felt like there were think pieces coming out every other day about the “Great Resignation,” how the nature of work is changing, and employees and employees both are being forced to recognize now that “work isn’t everything” — but at my workplace and my friends’ workplaces I didn’t see any of those mentality shifts bearing out. Specifically, I got hung up on the implicit job requirement still the norm at so many of these “disruptive, creative, visionary” organizations that you not only do your job, but love it – it’s an expectation that employees are truly “passionate” about their work, or at least good at pretending that they are. This whole era plus the buildup of the past five years of my corporate experiences brought questions that I wanted to explore through comedy, and that I felt were missing from all the TikToks and network sitcoms already out there about work: How many of my coworkers are truly “passionate” about their jobs, and how many are pretending? Does it serve us to believe we’re passionate about our jobs, no

matter how “true” it is? How much are we allowing ourselves to be brainwashed, versus brainwashing ourselves? If being disingenuous at work is inescapable, what’s the alternative?

I feel the need to reiterate at this point… it is a comedy! I’ve always had a lot of fun living in kind of obnoxious, pretentious “artiste” characters like the one I play as “The Temp,” so I felt it would be a perfect frame for the heavier themes to use the template of self-seriousness and performativity — an actor — to tell the story. My hope is this trope and the tropes of the office characters serve to accentuate each other and keep the narrative exciting.

Who would you like to come and see it?

You! But actually, most likely, you. Anyone who has ever held down a job in a corporate or corporate-adjacent field, or dealt with a difficult boss or coworker they love to vent about, or just felt trapped in their career or in their working identity or by capitalism in general. Again, as it is a comedy with many jokes, ideally we’d like audiences who like to laugh and appreciate regional American accents. I have been told by an aunt that some of the references may be best appreciated by younger audiences under the age of 35. However, we welcome all ages and stages and hope that there’s something in it for everyone!

What would you like audiences to take away from it?

Hopefully some fresh thoughts about your own relationship with work, a bit of new perspective on career ambition and incentive, and ideally motivation to engage in a raucous pub debate about it. Also, a big smile on your face and desire to tell all your friends to go see the show, because we are lost Americans who need your laughs to survive!

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