SAUGATUCK, Mich.–Living the life of a struggling actor in New York City is hard enough. It is all the more crazy when you are the reservation booker at pone off Manhattan’s most exclusive restaurants, work in the basement of the joint and have to balance a multitude of guilt trips, jealousies and ego-filled megalomaniacs who have the power over your ability to pay the rent.

Such is the situation in Fully Committed, the one-man show that has played on Broadway and is now making the rounds in regional theaters. The production now at The Mason Street Warehouse, featuring Francis Kelly is a homerun.

Kelly, playing the much-put-upon Sam Callahan, has to embody more than 40 characters and there are more than 150 sound cues that prompt a phone call, either on his desk-top phone for which he has a headset, our the wall phone that is a direct line to the star Chef. Kelly toggles among these many characters, changing demeanors, facial affectations, walks and gestures that has the audience dizzy from the work it must take to prepare for this role.

The work is evident, but does not show through the performance. Kelly ranges from his druggy head Chef, the affection ted French maitre d to a series of disgruntled fat-walleted patrons who are demanding they be seated when they want and where they want despite the three month wait for a weekend reservation. This place is the Hamilton of restaurants.

The play, by Becky Mode, opened in 1999 at the height of the dot-com frenzy when people were getting rich off the likes of Pets.com. That was long before we began talking about the 99% or the 1%, but the dynamic was in full force even as secretaries who got dot-com stock options seemed to democratize wealth for 5 minutes.

The timeliness of Full Committed now should not be lost. Sam represents all of us who work hard but who have not been so lucky. This crystalizes when within a few minutes he is compelled to clean up a poop-mess in the men’s room before the Chef’s mentor has to use it and he is fretting over whether or not he will be able to successfully book his boss’s car and helicopter to take him to prepare dinner for the Clintons.

Kelly bounces and weaves his way through the excellent set, depicting the basement hovel in which he has to work, with great dexterity and drawing out care and sympathy over his flagging acting career and his seemingly constant up hill climb. That he works in a basement is not an accident by the playwright.

It is a tour-de force for any actor to pull this off. Directed by David Alpert, Full Committed runs without intermission for approximately 90 minutes, which flies by and left every patron marveling at Mr. Kelly’s work.

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