Standard Safety is a one-act comedy by Julie Bovasso. A satirical consideration of office work, bureaucracy, gender relations, and the internal tyranny of corporations and the abject servitude of employees.

Standard Safety is set entirely in the company cafeteria of the Standard Safety Insurance Corporation. The play examines the experiences of two female employees from the accounting department who recount fantasies, parties, and psychoanalytic and romantic experiences. Their musings are interrupted by announcements assigning specific 5 minute periods for use of the bathrooms, proclaiming as disloyal (and firing) those who eat outside the lunchroom, and an introducing a lunchtime ballet by the company president.

Standard Safety was first produced in 1975 at the legendary La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club (La MaMa E.T.C.) off-off-Broadway in New York City.

Cast: 6 female, 7 male

What people say:

"Bovasso makes a whole teeming world emerge out of hers. It is the best integrated and most stylistically confident thing she has yet done in the theater, a bold step forward in a new performance tradition." — Village Voice

About the Playwright:

Julie Bovasso (1930-1991) was a multiple Obie-winning American actress, director, and playwright in the avant-garde theater Off-Broadway and Off Off-Broadway. In the mid-1950's, she established the experimental Tempo Playhouse on St. Marks Place in Manhattan and introduced works of the Theater of the Absurd, including those of the playwrights Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco and Michel de Ghelderode, to the professional theatre in the United States. Between 1968 and 1975, she directed many of her own original works at La MaMa, including Standard Safety.