Portraits
While Portraits takes place in a modern law firm with recognizable surroundings, its collection of characters are just as tragic as those vagabonds, kings, prostitutes, puppets, and clowns who search for meaning in an absurd world. It questions our values and illusions as it forces us to ask who are the real winners and losers as we pass through an existence none of us understand.

Portraits peels away the masks of conventionality through a quirky host that invites us to attend Bernie Geldmann's birthday party. The party is in the firm's conference room which has two portraits hanging side-by-side on a wall, one of Bernie and one of Beau Maguire, the firm's two founding partners. While the portraits furnish the play's title, they are also a metaphor for a moral struggle between the two founding partners. Bernie is an unjust man with an insatiable need for praise and control. Beau, who only appears through his portrait, is depicted as beloved by the employees. Beau's portrait and how people react to it, haunts Bernie every bit as much as Shakespeare’s ghosts haunted kings and princes.

Like all law firms, it has a menagerie of characters. We would all recognize servants; assistants frightened of their own shadow; those working to make ends meet; an odd one that challenges authority; loyalists; sycophants; the ambitious and self-absorbed, self-pitying lifers; and downright buffoons. This combination of characters, a flippant comment about Bernie's strange birthday request, and the inability of "important" people to laugh, especially at themselves, allow dysfunction to reign. In the end, the absurdities of the human condition are literally in front of our eyes.