Satire for Hire
How does one react to losing his or her job? In Ethan Lipton’s case, he penned No Place to Go, an Obie Award-winning ode to the unemployed. Centered on a nocturnal playwright whose day job gets outsourced to Mars, the work is inspired in part by the Brooklyn-based playwright and songwriter’s own life. Backed by his “orchestra” of longtime bandmates Eben Levy, Vito Dieterle and Ian Riggs, Lipton offers a first-person monologue rife with workplace woes. According to the New York Times, he does so with “the gift of seeing the everyday at just enough of a slant to slide flat prose into prickly poetry.”
