Rhetorical Review

Thoughtful, funny, and thought-provoking: a sharp, absurdist gut-punch about how we spend our lives at work through the metaphor of a CEO’s office birthday party

Salt Lake City, UT—I went into Happy Birthday, Mr. President expecting an office comedy and left thinking about a question I’d already been sitting with from another project entirely: whose birthday are we actually celebrating this year, the 250th birthday of the United States of America—is there anything to really celebrate?

The Setup

On the surface, this is a chaotic little party play. A CEO’s surprise birthday spirals into party hats, a blindfolded game of donkey, and a slightly unhinged round of charades. But underneath the slapstick, the show is doing something genuinely clever. It’s a commentary on modern work culture, and it doesn’t let you look away from that for long.

The structure is the trick. Every time the party threatens to just be a party, the show cuts to a monologue: a “timekeeper,” paid fractions of a cent per second to babysit other people’s productivity; the flashback to a summer slaughtering pigs on a German farm, which he insists, with a straight face, was more honest work than the office; a wandering parable about a man who spent a year watching flamingos at the zoo before he learned to watch people instead. Each of these lands like a splash of cold water right after a laugh, and the show never lets the audience settle into either mode for long. That whiplash is the whole point. It mirrors exactly the way modern work culture asks people to perform lightness (mandatory “fun,” ironic name tags, forced camaraderie) while quietly grinding away at anything resembling actual time or meaning.

Whose Day’s Work Counts

What makes it feel political rather than just cynical is how specific the satire gets. The “let’s cancel lunch hour” bit, the audit of the CEO’s own worth in cents-per-second, the running joke that even a boss can’t stop being managed: it’s less “corporate life is silly” and more a pointed argument about how everyone in this system, from CEO to intern, has been conscripted into treating their own hours as inventory.

But the real engine of the piece isn’t the satire. It’s the question underneath it: where do we actually find meaning in a day’s work, and who gets to decide what counts? The time keeper monologue is the darkest version of the question, a job with no purpose beyond the counting itself, meaning manufactured entirely after the fact, in dollars per second. The pig farm story is the CEO’s counter-argument, deployed specifically to talk the intern out of quitting: brutal, isolating labor that somehow still felt more honest than an office, precisely because the exhaustion was earned rather than performed. And the zoo parable splits the difference, finding meaning not in the work itself, but in simply paying attention to the people around you. The play is smart enough not to crown a winner. It stages all three as genuine attempts at an answer, then quietly points out that none of them fully works, which is what keeps the piece feeling honest rather than preachy.

I couldn’t help but think here of something David McCourt said to me recently, in conversation about his film Amerigo — a documentary asking whether the American Dream still holds up—asked at national scale rather than office scale. McCourt keeps returning to his grandfather, a janitor who “owned his own home… raised my mother,” as a material benchmark for whether the American Dream still functions. It’s a useful yardstick, but as I noted in that piece, it also risks treating a whole category of labor as symbol rather than testimony, present in the room but not always the one holding the mic. Happy Birthday, Mr. President runs into a smaller version of the same tension: whose day’s work gets narrated as meaningful (the CEO’s, in grand parable form) and whose gets treated mostly as color (the party staff, the “intern” reduced to a role rather than a name for most of the show). The play seems to know this, since the intern spends half the runtime being denied his own name tag, but it’s worth naming as a limit, not just a joke.

The Intern and the Comedy of Deflation

The intern is doing a lot of quiet structural work here. He’s the audience’s way in: young, still deciding whether any of this is worth it, close enough to the bottom of the ladder to say the things everyone else has learned not to say out loud. His “I quit” isn’t played as a big dramatic turn; it’s almost a throwaway line, delivered and then casually ignored by the CEO, which is its own joke about how little leverage that kind of protest actually has. That’s where the show’s dark comedy really lives, not in one-liners, but in the gap between what a line should mean (quitting, collapsing, a health scare) and how weightlessly the play lets everyone shrug it off and get back to the party. The CEO’s chest-clutching moment is a good example: genuinely alarming for a beat, then deflated instantly with a joke about shrimp. The show keeps building toward something that should land as tragedy, then refuses to let it land, which ends up being funnier and bleaker than if it had just played the tragedy straight.

Ray and the Office as Zoo

Ray, the COO, gets the show’s most purely physical comedy, and it’s a welcome release valve. At several points he’s up the walls, literally, scaling the set with a kind of manic acrobatic energy that has nothing to do with plot and everything to do with pressure finding somewhere to go. It reads like the body doing what the dialogue won’t let itself do: if the intern is the one who says “I quit” and gets ignored, Ray is the one who just climbs, wordlessly, until someone tells him to get down. It’s a small bit, but it’s one of the clearest physical jokes in the show.

It also plays into something the show does well without ever underlining it: the whole office starts to feel like a zoo. There’s the literal blindfolded donkey game early on, the zoo parable about the man who learned to watch flamingos, and then Ray, up on the wall, moving like something that’s escaped an enclosure. The workers get their own version of it too: as they’re playing the party games, they have their own bursts of unhinged, almost feral energy, moments where the professional veneer just drops and something looser and stranger takes over. Put together, it’s hard not to read the office itself as the exhibit, with the party as feeding time and the employees as animals performing for an audience that isn’t really watching. Nobody in the play says this out loud, which is exactly why it works. The comparison builds entirely through staging and repetition rather than a line of dialogue that would flatten it into a thesis statement.

The intern, by contrast, stays almost entirely composed through all of it, calm and reasoning even as everyone around him gets swept up, and that composure comes out mostly as questions: why the lunch hour has to go, why the party has to double as a performance review, why any of this counts as “fun” in the first place. That contrast does real work: if the office is the exhibit, he’s the one figure who reads as watching it and asking about it rather than living inside it unquestioned, which lines up neatly with his role as the audience’s way in.

The Intern’s Breaking Point

That composure has exactly one crack in it before the end. The President’s pig-farm monologue is aimed squarely at him, an attempt to talk him out of quitting by making the alternative sound worse, but it doesn’t land the way it’s meant to: the intern tries to quit anyway. That attempt gets shut down, though, and for a while he’s kept in the room regardless. It’s the clearest sign, before the finale, that even the intern’s calm has limits, and that persuasion in this office doesn’t run as smoothly as the person in charge assumes, but it also shows that quitting, here, isn’t actually up to the person quitting.

The Cast

It’s worth naming names here, especially given the point above about who gets narrated and who gets treated as background.

Morgan Wongsuwan plays the President/CEO, including the show’s central timekeeper monologue, the character’s own origin story as someone once paid fractions of a cent per second to count time itself. Wongsuwan elected not to provide a bio “to maintain an air of mystery,” offering only: “Undeniable charisma, teehee.” Fair enough. His performance backs it up.

Henry Twitchell plays Ray/the COO. His improv résumé includes Improv Ave, Don’t Blame Me, I Voted For Ralph TermiNader: Salvation, and Jurassic Park: The Minion: Kevin, Stuart, and Bob. Off stage, he’s studying mechanical engineering and is active in his school’s rocketry and robotics clubs, with a long-declared career goal of “Evil Scientist living in a volcano lair.” Twitchell describes the show as a chance to skewer the corporate-banality tropes he’s absorbed as a self-described superfan of comedy and drama series. His chosen quote: “Even cowgirls get the blues.” — Gorgug Thistlespring.

Thomas Lambert, one of the show’s two co-directors, also stepped into the role of the Intern at the last minute, which makes the character’s constant not-quite-belonging in the office feel almost accidentally on the nose. Lambert describes himself as a theatre student “with all the pretentiousness that comes with,” fairly new to directing but more at home in acting and dramaturgy.

Zoe Lupcho, playing among the workers/party staff, brings real specificity to a role the script itself doesn’t always give much room to, which, if anything, sharpens the argument above about whose labor the play foregrounds versus who it leaves as texture. Lupcho recently graduated from the University of Utah’s Actor Training program; her credits include an internship with Pioneer Theatre Company as an understudy for Prayer for a French Republic, and Cathy in You on the Moors Now! as her final project at the U. She also cites POWELL, an immersive project with Patchwork Theatre Company, as a formative experience. This is her first Fringe.

Creative Team

The production is co-directed by Thomas Lambert and Shila Sudbury. Sudbury, described as “an eccentric teenage girl who enjoys acting and seasonal fruit,” has directed three previous shows and was excited to build something new with this cast. Her chosen quote: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” — V.W.

Bottom Line

It’s rough around the edges in the way a lot of fringe work is: some transitions are more chaotic than intentional, and a couple of bits (a second round of charades, a tangent about flamingos) sprawl longer than they need to. But the ideas underneath are doing real work, and the ending earns its complexity. The group circles back to an actual, sincere “happy birthday,” cake and all, and it lands with more weight than it has any right to. But it’s not where the play actually leaves him: after the song, after everyone’s had their moment, the intern finally does walk out. He tried to quit once already and got talked down; this time, nothing stops him. That last beat keeps the warmth of the group singalong from being the whole story.

If you want polished, tidy theater, this isn’t quite that. If you want something that’s funny and has something to say about how we’ve all been taught to relate to our own time, and this year especially, to each other’s, it’s well worth the hour.