Helen conducts assessments. She asks the questions in order, notes the answers, and clarifies discrepancies. She is not cold, exactly — coldness would be a feeling. She is procedural: patient, precise, and relentless in the way a form is relentless, returning to every inconsistency until it resolves into something she can write down. The role's difficulty is its restraint. Helen never raises her voice, never softens, never breaks protocol — and the actor must resist every instinct to signal warmth or menace underneath. Whether Helen is a person, a policy, or something the institution built to sound like a person is a question the play declines to answer, and the performance should decline to answer it too. Her one moment of visible humanity — she stops writing, then resumes — lasts a beat.

Alex is good at his job. He gets it done. He has answered questions like these before — performance reviews, check-ins, doctor's visits — and he knows the correct answers: fine, consistent, within normal range. What he has not accounted for is a questioner who writes everything down and comes back to it. Alex's arc is a slow structural failure, visible in increments: the beat before "yeah," the qualifier after "good," the hand that reaches for the coffee cup and pulls back. The actor's job is management, not display — Alex is not falling apart, he is working harder and harder to stay assembled, and the effort is what the audience watches. When "I feel useless" escapes, it should surprise him more than anyone. He spends the rest of the play trying to take it back.
The role rewards an actor with precise control of pauses and self-interruption; most of Alex's truth lives in his punctuation.