As I often write for plays and TV shows set in the worlds of finance, law and tech, my research kept circling around one particularly opaque and intriguing industry: the consulting industry. I was especially interested in the sorts of people who end up working as management consultants: the fact that so many bright young graduates from prestigious colleges get snapped up by these firms as soon as they graduate. I wanted to know: what services were these “exceptional” twenty-year-old consultants actually providing to their clients? How had these firms seemingly snaked their tendrils into everything, across the private and public sector, becoming an outsourced talent pool for every white-collar industry in the world? Eventually, I went on a deep research dive into the history and practices of the Big Three consulting firms – and what I discovered made me so mad I wrote a play about it. 

Centering on an unnamed protagonist navigating her first year at one of these firms, American Signs is a play that’s hugely interested in selective information; how we warp language, data and narratives for our own purposes, and the lies we tell ourselves to survive. This is my first time writing a one-performer play – a form that felt perfectly suited to this theme. With one actor performing multiple characters, you can endlessly play with the audience’s sympathies and attention, challenging notions of subjectivity and your narrator’s reliability.  

It also helped that I had a great actor in mind: this play was written for the extraordinary Catherine Van Davies, whose virtuosic talent I have been in awe of since she was in my first play White Pearl at STC in 2019. I’m equally thrilled to be collaborating for the first time with the wonderful Kenneth Moraleda, who has already been an extraordinary creative ally as we’ve developed this play. 

While American Signs is a pointed critique of the consulting industry, it’s also a character study about a young Vietnamese American woman grappling with her own traumas, ambitions, and desires in a morally complicated universe. I’ve written this play as a corporate thriller and a 60-minute roller coaster, one which hurtles towards its climax and never lets its audience off the hook. I hope audiences come away from American Signs entertained, amused, titillated, possibly a little disturbed, and with a more nuanced understanding of what consulting really looks like in America today. 

Anchuli Felicia King (Photo: Prudence Upton)