One of the joys of the theater is its ability to transport viewers, from a seat in a hall above a small town’s library, for example, into a chaotic scene of metropolitan glamour and ego.

This is part of what makes Fully Committed, a one-act, one-actor play currently in production at Shaker Bridge Theatre in Enfield, so delightful. Written in 1999 by playwright-producer-actor Becky Mode, the riotous Fully Committed is as much a condemnation of urban elitism as it is about clawing oneself out of stagnancy and accruing small victories that snowball into something worth calling home about.

This production also marks the second run of Fully Committed at Shaker Bridge. The last iteration, in 2010, was also reviewed in the Valley News.

Directed by Shaker Bridge founder Bill Coons at the mile-a-minute, yet tautly controlled pace it deserves, the 90-minute production follows a hellish restaurant shift for an out-of-work actor named Sam, who is stuck fielding calls at the reservations desk of a fabulous, and fabulously exclusive, Manhattan eatery.

Played with comedic aplomb by Matt Crabtree in his Shaker Bridge debut, Sam has not only found himself ditched by his co-workers, left to juggle simultaneous phone calls from irate A-listers, C-listers who think they’re B-listers, panicking hostesses and a barking redneck chef.

He’s also trying not to sound too depressed whenever his recently widowed father calls to ask if Sam will have the day off for Christmas (it’s not looking good), and trying not to sound too desperate whenever he dials his agency to check if he got a callback at Lincoln Center (it’s not looking much better). All the while, he’s reeling from a recent breakup and questioning pretty much every major choice he’s made in his life thus far.

The entirety of the professional-meets-personal storyline unfolds via these rapid-fire telephone calls. This creates a tall order for Crabtree, who must deftly negotiate some 40 different dialects, tics and mannerisms at the drop of a hat.

Because of the sheer volume of characters, the story relies on the audience’s connection to Sam to elicit sympathy, rather than laughs alone (though it elicits that, too). Fortunately, Sam’s backstory, which emerges in the brief exhales between restaurant mini-crises, is what helps elevate Fully Committed, turning its slight premise into a testament to the perils and powers of self-entitlement.

To Crabtree’s credit, he manages to capture each major character as a fully realized, if utterly ridiculous, person. After a few rounds with a bellowing patrician by the name of Carolann Rosenstein-Fishburn who demands to speak to the coke-snorting maitre’d, or Mrs. Sebag who is simply overcome, darling, when her reservation cannot be found in the restaurant’s computer system, we begin to recognize who’s on the line based on how their voice pitch climbs at the words, “Sorry, we are fully committed,” or, more often, “Please hold.”

This is a testament to Crabtree’s versatility, vocal precision and comic timing, but the performance also highlights the deflation of power in a privilege-saturated market. When everybody is a Very Important Person, nobody is — except, paradoxically, the person who decides where to seat you. If at all.

Some gems of Crabtree’s, which he seems both to relish and to excel at, include Gwyneth Paltrow’s high-strung assistant, Bryce; a pretentious and implicitly pot-smoking acting colleague with whom Sam shares a toxically competitive bond; and, above all, the burly head chef who, despite being a darling of the burgeoning “molecular gastronomy” movement (think lavender foam and edible dirt priced at $300 per ounce-sized serving), has never heard of Diane Sawyer.

One of the primary challenges for Fully Committed’s only actor is not to mock the play’s many characters, but rather to become them fully, even for just a moment, so as to let their absurdities speak for themselves. Crabtree is generally on point in this regard, though once or twice he delivers his lines with an air so caustic that it borders on a cheap shot, especially for the crueler characters. This is unnecessary: Because their personalities are already such caricatures, they do not require a heavy hand from Crabtree to come alive.

The script, though nearing its 20th year, still feels fresh in its abundance of sly, precise jabs at our cultural monarchs: Gwyneth Paltrow, Bryce informs us, does not eat legumes; a mafia man demands a waiter who can sing Sinatra; wait, who is Alan Greenspan again? And so on.

The Valley News’ 2010 review of Fully Committed noted that the play was already “a period piece,” despite some revisions of the original script, and the play continues to date itself. Back in 1999, when cultural appropriation was not discussed to the same degree as it is today, it may not have felt quite so cringe-worthy to watch a white man repeatedly impersonating Mexican and Lebanese workers, accents and all. But 2017 demands a keener sensitivity to what it means to be an immigrant in America, and though the question of how to bring diversity to a one-actor play is one that yields no easy answers, and though the accents certainly aren’t performed in a mean-spirited manner, it still doesn’t sit quite right.

If anything, Crabtree’s strongest character is also the one who seems most out-of-place in this bastion of one-percenters and their frazzled help: the nameless chef, who, after the editor of Bon Appetit magazine advises him to play nicely, grumbles loudly about what part of his anatomy the editor can play nicely with.

The chef’s crudeness, aside from leading to some of the play’s funniest moments, also speaks to the divide between social orders that is bridged by any of several universals: fear; fastidious control over one’s image; food, as both status symbol and sustenance.

And this divide is not something you need to live in Manhattan to appreciate. In fact, it may even be especially salient to a small-town stage, from which the legumeless world of Gwyneth Paltrow can feel both enticing and alien.

Indeed, that’s why many of us choose to live here, where any hankering for big city drama can be satisfied by a night at the theater.

Fully Committed runs at Shaker Bridge Theatre through May 14. For tickets and information call the theater at 603-448-3750 or go to shakerbridgetheatre.org.

EmmaJean Holley can be reached at eholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.