One of 2x4BASH’s summer features is a sharp and genuine workplace dramedy.

Even in a world where media is associated with the words “online,” “digital,” and “on demand,” it seems safe to say that the curtain will never close completely on the movie theater experience. They continue to deliver more: surround sound, XD, velvet seats, expanded menus. The ultimate escape from our own lives.

The run-down movie palace at the center of Annie Baker’s play The Flick – with its lackluster seats and outdated technology – doesn’t fit this description of grandeur. Even so, film aficionado Avery (Drew Davis-Wheeler) is drawn to the nostalgia of working a theater with a 35-millimeter film projector (think Cinema Paradiso-style). He and his cohorts, trod-upon veteran usher Sam (James Marshall) and devil-may-care projectionist Rose (Sierra Papazian), engage in slice-of-life banter and battle moral conflicts as they perform the unromantic duties of movie-theater upkeep.

Director Mark Englehorn’s use of the space – a stageless “black box” theater with audience seating on three sides – adds freshness to the dialogue-driven vignettes that form the play’s structure. The Flick is about people who love movies, and by all rights it should wax sentimental about this most superior medium. An argument over the merits of James Cameron’s Avatar did have me rolling in the aisles. Nevertheless, this play finds more of its common ground in its disillusioned workplace setting. The tedium of sweeping up popcorn residue opposes the glamour associated with film, and there are many more clench-your-stomach-in-sympathy moments than any love letter to the cinema should have. This is not your average love letter.

In a touchingly delivered monologue, Avery opens up to his therapist about his worries for the future. “Maybe it’s never going to get better,” he says – a plague of a voice that seems to target the people old enough to have settled down in a career but young enough to feel pressured to move on. It plagues Sam, whose dreams of becoming a chef are brought up in a throwaway line. It plagues Rose, whose student debt leads her to make questionable choices about money.

Most of all, it plagues Avery, who has more reason than most to use film as an escape: to get out of his own head. At the end of a movie, it always gets better. But that’s not how life works, and The Flick is smart enough to find both the bleak humor and the unexpected moments of joy in this truism.

THE FLICK runs 7:30pm Fri-Sat, Aug. 17-18, at Western Stage Studio Theater, Hartnell College, 411 Central Ave., Salinas. $10/general; $5/students, veterans, seniors ; free/Hartnell students. 755-6816, westernstage.com