Image via Nu Sass Productions/Capital Fringe

By DCist Contributor Rachel Kurzius

“We’re working on it.”

“It’s out of our jurisdiction.”

“We simply don’t have the resources.”

We get the runaround all the time from people using cold, jargon-filled phrases. In The Paper Game, bureaucrat-ese becomes a darkly funny battle of wits.

The show starts off toggling between two conversations. In one, a besuited Robert (Keegan Cassady) is trying to teach Jane (Aubri O’Connor) “The Game.” While there’s a board game on the set and a game show buzzer, The Game is really a method for allocating resources and, according to Robert, it’s “all about how you play the game.”

In the “lower levels” Denise (Tiffany Byrd) is explaining The Game to Ty (Ronnie Brown), surrounded by filing cabinets and paper. A major accident means that Denise and Ty must face off against Robert and Jane in “The Game” to determine whether they’ll get rescued, fusing the two conversations.

The personified version of The Game (Bess Kaye) looks like David Bowie’s Thin White Duke, blindfolded with a laptop and buzzer that denotes “right” and “wrong” answers. The computer glows eerily when the stage is otherwise dark. At its core, though, The Game is about the rules we use to create a functioning society and how unfeeling they can seem. After all, it’s not many shows that will make a convincing case for why you shouldn’t bother saving an orphanage.

The Paper Game is tight and well-acted, save for a few moments when actors step on each other’s lines while switching from one scene to the next. Cassady and Byrd, as the gifted practitioners of The Game, get the most meat to work with, and boy, do they take advantage of it. Tiffany Byrd is a gifted comedian, and ably shows what is most ridiculous and most human about her character’s predicament.

The Paper Game manages to make dull words alive and hilarious, all while demonstrating how much the joke is on us.

The Paper Game plays at the Atlas Performing Arts Center: Sprenger. The final remaining performance is:

Saturday July 25 at 2:30 p.m.

See here for more of DCist’s Fringe 2015 reviews