Now at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, *Care Cafe!* is presented as a live play in the East Village, where downtown theater has long tested new forms and civic questions. The piece frames a café as a workplace of care, listening, and transaction, tracing how emotional labor becomes routine and how communities rely on it. It arrives in a venue with a history of introducing boundary-pushing work to New York audiences, placing the play in a local lineage rather than a single run. Its clearest insight is how care, once institutionalized, can start to resemble service.