Beverly answers the phones. Beverly waters the plants. Beverly is excellent at her job. Beverly’s job is at a place where some very specific things happen in the back room — and Adam Bock’s The Receptionist, a jet-black 80-minute comedy about how cheerful bureaucracy and quiet complicity coexist, has been one of the most stealthily devastating American plays of the last twenty years. Second Stage Theater is staging it now at the Pershing Square Signature Center’s Irene Diamond Stage, and the moment could not be more pointed.

The cast is a New York-theater murderer’s row: Tony winner Katie Finneran as Beverly, with Mallori Johnson, Nael Nacer, and Will Pullen rounding out an ensemble where everybody plays a person, and a person plays a cog. Direction by Sarah Benson (who has built a career on plays that look small until they aren’t). 80 minutes, no intermission, a lobby chat afterward that will probably last three times that long.

Limited three-week run only.