Just another day in the apocalypse

The end-product of the adventurously quotidian world premiere that opened Saturday, March 12, at Marin Theatre Company is incisively bittersweet comedy with an empathetic undertow.

“Swimmers” is just another day in the cookie-cutter contemporary workplace, but one in which many of the personal quirks, desires, insecurities and domestic problems emerge in deft strokes from the surface-intimacy between strangers who spend most of their days working side-by-side.

[...] one in which office interactions may be imbued with the apocryphal fears of the day, whether of terrorism, climate change, coyotes or more mythical matters.

A Bay Area debut for Bonds, whose work has been widely produced in the past few years, and winner of the 2015 Sky Cooper New American Play Prize (announced Friday, March 11), “Swimmers” is an uncommonly big play for one that focuses on intimate interchanges.

It’s a tale that encompasses an entire office building, unfolding floor-by-floor as the action moves from the basement to the roof.

[...] the size and length of the undertaking may dwarf its emotional impact.

Scenic designer Dane Laffrey capitalizes on the sameness of such offices to make smooth transitions between the many floors as the ominous drone in Theodore J.H. Hulsker’s soundscape seems to emerge from the buzzing fluorescent lights.

Let’s just say that Jolly Abraham brilliantly conveys the comically awkward daring of a woman trying to date a colleague, Aaron Roman Weiner is a magnetic model of a man shellshocked by fear and loss and L. Peter Callender excels as the janitor trying, and failing, to mind his own business.