Playwright: Kristoffer Diaz. At: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St. Tickets: 1-312-443-3800; www.GoodmanTheatre.org; $10-$40. Runs through: April 26
With roots going back more than 2,000 years, farce is the most difficult type of drama to write. The most successful farce authors—among them Britain’s Alan Ayckbourn and France’s Georges Feydeau—make it their specialty, but non-specialists are drawn to farce as moths to fire, and many are burned. Kristoffer Diaz joins their number with The Upstairs Concierge.
The truth is U.S. authors and audiences don’t grow up with farce, as Europeans do. We grow up with sitcom, which isn’t at all the same thing. Diaz repeats the mistake of many before him: the belief that farce will be successful if it’s fast and loud. This is fundamentally untrue. Farce can use speed and noise—and usually does—but only after it’s achieved something far more important first: credibility, or the truth of its characters. Farce succeeds only when highly probable people do highly improbable things. Diaz doesn’t take the time necessary to establish his characters as bedrock-real. He also places at the apex of his spinning play a character who really doesn’t have anything at stake.
Briefly, a swank Chicago hotel is opening three celebrity suites, the doors of which do not lock, with a live-in concierge (Tawny Newsome) to make the celebs (called “pretties”) feel like one happy family. The suites are the career highpoint for the husband/wife hotel owners (Cedric Young, Mia Park). The celebs are a best-selling novelist (Sandra Delgado), a vacuous gossip blogger (Jose Antonio Garcia) and a female bunt specialist (Alejandra Escalante) pursued by Major League Baseball scouts. The hotel owner, doubling as a White Sox scout, is the one with something at stake who should be attempting to hold all the other scouts (Yankees, Red Sox, Cubs, Astros) at bay. Instead, the focus is on the concierge, who inexplicably spends all her time keeping the celebs apart rather than making them a happy family, and inexplicably lies to her boss about the bunt specialist.
Diaz makes the further mistake of withholding information from the audience, such as secret elevators in each suite and a past affair between the hotel owner’s wife and the blogger. These details should be part of the play’s mechanics but instead are meaningless gags. To be sure, there are funny moments and lines in The Upstairs Concierge—the novelist miming the plot of her latest book is wonderful—but the structure doesn’t work.
Todd Rosenthal’s oak-rich two-level scenic design, in Charles Rennie Mackintosh style, is gorgeous. Ms. Theo Allyn steals scenes as the Yankee scout, the sole character utilizing cross-gender casting. Why? Director KJ Sanchez provides speed and energy but cannot make The Upstairs Concierge more than fleetingly funny. Diaz’s concept is good, but a fundamental rethink is needed.