In the New Mexico desert, a down-on-her-luck folk singer (Deirdre O’Connell) takes a job at a giant online retailer’s shipping center. Her young manager struggles to connect with his girlfriend newly relocated from New York. And a drifter living at a local campground dangerously links them all. Raw, surprising, and funny, this world premiere from the fast-rising author of Kill Floor is about four lonely lives coming together in the search for fulfillment.

The complexity of navigating relationships — and the delicate dance between independence and intimacy — have always been challenging parts of the human condition, and our disjointed modern world only seems to intensify them. Fulfillment Center, a new play written by Abe Koogler and directed by Daniel Aukin at Manhattan Theatre Club, explores these challenges with a skillful balance of depth and humor, and uses endearingly-flawed characters to prove their difficulty. Through a mix of personalities whose lives intersect in a small New Mexico town (at times only by association), the play shows that our stories are much more connected than we realize, and that our choices influence others’ lives just as much as our own. The backdrop for most of the drama is a large, unnamed package shipping company — a fast-paced, no-frills customer order “fulfillment center.”  We first meet the manager-on-duty, Alex (Bobby Moreno), as he trains new recruit Suzan (Deirdre O’Connell), an older, single drifter who struggles to meet the job’s physical demands. But we soon learn that Alex is plagued by his own health problems, triggered by a stressful relationship with his girlfriend Madeleine (Eboni Bo …Read more