Mind Games

Hanging out with the staff from Play after work can be a surreal experience. Didn't these people just spend an entire day together? What could they possibly have left to talk about? And why would they choose to spend so much time together? The answer is simple: Play is personal. It's hard to be creative with people whom you don't genuinely like. And these are friends as well as colleagues. Indeed, many of the Play staffers know as much about one another as most people know about their siblings. For instance, everyone knows that Natalie Greenberg, 26, gets weak-kneed over fashions from Milan. They know that Stefanovich uses his blue jeans as a four-pocket filing system: personal stuff in the left front, notes on stuff happening today in the right front, stuff that needs to be acted on today in the right back, and ideas that need further development in the left back. They know that when Page was 12 she was bitten by a shark. They know that Hammond is extremely competitive in all games involving a red rubber ball. They know that John Morgan, 24, who now sports a goatee and thick-rimmed glasses and talks like a surfer, was once enrolled at Virginia Military Institute and later taught English in Estonia. ("Just think of all these poor Estonians running around going, 'Duuuude!' " Stefanovich jokes.)

It's not unusual for Play's people to play together after work two or three nights a week -- attending one of Throckmorton's plays (he's an actor on the side), working out (Stefanovich, Morgan, Leon, and Page entered a triathlon last year), grabbing beers, or just hanging out. Tonight, the plan is to get beers at a new microbrewery and then catch Morgan's band, which is playing at another joint. The band, which the staff is trying to help Morgan name (some top contenders include Cirque du Suck and Nary the Twain), mostly does Grateful Dead covers. But Morgan's coworkers don't seem to care what he plays -- they're just excited to see him on stage. When he notices the whole crew troop into the bar at a little after 10 PM, he smiles broadly, salutes with a drumstick, and keeps on rocking.

For Morgan, and for many of the staff members at Play, there is no rift between work life and personal life. Their lives have a seamlessness that is rare. And they know it. "Play is my life," Morgan says simply. "And I don't mean that in a cheesy way. But this is definitely not just a job. When I go home, I'm no different than when I'm at work. The clothes that I wear to band practice are the same clothes that I wear to work. My friends on the weekends are my friends at work. They come to hear my band play. When Andy's out of town, I bring Gekko to work. We have a passion at Play that is deeper than anything I've come in contact with.

"I try not to talk about it very much with friends who don't work at Play, because I can see in their faces that they don't work in the same kind of place. It's just something that we have to cherish and try to preserve because we like it so much."

Preserving that culture is Rochester's full-time job. As company "ambassador," she represents Play to the outside world on various boards and on pro bono projects, and she is the keeper of the flame internally. How does she keep the creative fires burning? With lots of small gestures that reflect people's commitment to one another. "I'll ask different people for their car keys, and then I'll go fill up their car with gas and wash it," she says. "I'll place a plastic cone in front of the building and reserve it for a certain person for the day. When somebody goes on a road trip, we put water and fruit in a bag and hand it to that person on the way out the door. The other day, I bought 31 milk shakes and brought them in. You would have thought I brought in a million dollars. It was just $80 worth of milk shakes. What's 80 bucks in the grand scheme of things when it comes to keeping people excited about being here?"

That support really matters. It's the reason that many people who work at Play say they can't imagine working anywhere else. "I get to act like me," Hopkins explains, "which is my favorite thing to do." Hopkins is divorced, and he spends every other weekend with his daughter, Morgan, who is five and a half. Recently, he took a half-day off of work to have lunch with her in her kindergarten classroom. He drove more than two hours to her school, met her teacher, and ate lunch with her. "As I left, she got really sad because she didn't want me to leave. It was pretty awful. She started to cry, asking, 'When am I going to see you again?' I hugged her and told her that it wouldn't be long. Just till the next Saturday. And as I left the classroom, I looked back and saw her counting out how many days that was on her fingers." Hopkins sighs heavily. "That was so difficult. The last thing you would think I'd want to do would be to head back to work. But I was driving back as quickly as I could. I was just so grateful to have those people to come back to."