Pick Up Ax

by Anthony Clarvoe

Silicon Valley greed is the subject of Anthony Clarvoe’s PICK UP AX, a reference to a command in a computer game. Brian and Keith are out of ideas to move their software company forward when a stranger, Mick, arrives, ready and willing to do what it takes to get ahead, even if it means extortion.“PICK UP AX … has a smart, sassy script that’s studded with bright, funny dialogue … Clarvoe’s very hip script centers on the fortunes of two bright young men, Keith Rienzi and Brian Weiss, who have bootstrapped themselves from a free-wheeling, penny-ante operation into a multi-million dollar computer software corporation through Keith’s inventive brilliance and Brian’s business instincts. But at twenty-seven, Keith is losing some of his whiz-kid brain, Brian’s financial pipeline is drying up, and their supplier is refusing to deliver vital microchips to them. Just when these two aging wunderkind are facing disaster, in walks … Mick Palomar, a slick operator armed with an M B A and a flair for old-fashioned extortion …” —Richard Christiansen, Chicago Tribune“PICK UP AX is a fast, funny, entertaining play about a fascinating the growing pains of the personal computer industry … PICK UP AX is likely to be an audience-pleaser because of the sheer exuberance and wit of the script …” —Brin., Variety

80 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1991

About the author

Anthony Clarvoe’s award-winning plays and adaptations include THE JUST (based on LES JUSTES by Albert Camus; premiered by Chautauqua Theater Company), THE ART OF SACRIFICE (Merrimack Repertory), CTRL+ALT+DELETE (George Street Playhouse and San Jose Repertory), CITY OF LIGHT (Studio Arena Theatre), THE WILD DUCK (Great Lakes Theater Festival) WALKING OFF THE ROOF (Signature Theatre), AMBITION FACING WEST (Trinity Repertory), GHOSTS (Intiman Theatre), THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV (Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park), THE LIVING (Denver Center Theatre and over 40 productions worldwide), LET'S PLAY TWO (South Coast Repertory), SHOW AND TELL (Repertory Theatre of St. Louis), and PICK UP AX (San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre Company). They are performed across the United States, receiving over a dozen drama critics' awards in Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and elsewhere, as well as fellowships and grants from TCG/Pew Charitable Trusts, the John Simon Guggenheim, W. Alton Jones, McKnight, Jerome, and Berrilla Kerr Foundations, Kennedy Center/Fund for New American Plays, and, twice, from the National Endowment for the Arts. The scripts are published by Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. Born in San Francisco, Anthony lives in Ohio with his wife, producer and actress Kate Clarvoe, and two sons.

Reviews

[Martin Denton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pick Up Ax, by Anthony Clarvoe, tells the story of two young men at the helm of a Silicon Valley software company in the early 1980s. Brian Weiss is the front-man, a savvy but principled MBA who is being eaten alive (literally: he has an ulcer) by the cutthroat world of emerging high-tech business. His partner, Keith Rienzi, is the company's resident genius and bread-and-butter: a wired eccentric who pads around the office in his socks, banging on keyboards in search of inspiration for his next great idea. Brian and Keith are in crisis: their suppliers are no longer cooperating with them, Brian is having serious difficulties with his Board of Directors, and Keith appears to be at least momentarily blocked. Suddenly and out of the blue, a stranger named Mick Palomar shows up, ready to apply some age-old but not very pretty strategies (e.g., extortion) to give our boys the upper hand. A power struggle inevitably ensues: who is going to end up on top?

Pick Up Ax, written in 1990, is in many ways a period piece, but it can teach us some things about our collective history and collective psyche that more topical fare cannot. Pick Up Ax reveals how distant such ideals as a moral, ethical code in the world of business now seem. Its protagonist--far from feeling heat, let alone compunction, for swimming with (past) a school of very nasty sharks--is rewarded for his less-than-ethical actions; and not just in the outcome of the plot, mind you: we actually kind of like and admire this guy, in spite of the fact that--or, more disturbingly, maybe because--we recognize in him the soulless signposts of our recent Age of Greed. Sure, one of the high-powered wannabe executives in this play says, regarding a move that will cause a swift and certain reduction in their company's stock price, "We need to protect the interests of our shareholders." But it seems to me that the almost quaint quality of that speech is precisely at the heart of Clarvoe's intention here: how much does our world, which has yet to prosecute robber barons far more brazen than the original ones of the 1890s, admire and reward the wrong sorts of behavior?

Clarvoe turns out to be somewhat prescient in one other way: his genius-turned-CEO realizes, near the end of the play, that the Next Big Thing isn't software at all, or at least not software that does something. Pick Up Ax ends, ominously, with what sounds like a conspiracy theorist's worst nightmare of the birth of the now-commonplace computer virus.

There are inconsistencies and imperfections in the script that suggest that Clarvoe hasn't spent a great deal of time working in a large corporation; and his unwillingness (or inability) to reconcile the more fantastical elements of his play (such as Palomar's almost supernatural appearance in Brian's office--for a while, I thought he was supposed to be Mephistopheles) is jarring. But Pick Up Ax turns out to be a valuable document of recent history, at the very least a source of real food for thought.