The Upstairs Concierge by Kristoffer Diaz (review)

In today’s concierge economy the idea of paying a premium for a service is not something exclusive to the rich. Uber can be your taxi, Instacart can deliver your groceries; why not have a twenty-four-hour hotel concierge whose bed is right behind the reception desk so that she can cater to guests around the clock? This is the premise of Kristoffer Diaz’s new play, which takes place in a conceivable world where slogans about family and customer service are painted on the wall for everyone to see, but trademarked so nobody can reproduce them without payment. The play is set in a new, swanky Chicago hotel, designed only for celebrities, with just three rooms and an eager-to-please concierge who provides service, and more importantly caters to some of the outlandish people that society deems fascinating. Diaz, a Guggenheim fellow and Pulitzer Prize nominee, uses farce to critique American consumer and celebrity culture, but behind all of the antics The Upstairs Concierge provides a solemn meditation on technology’s role in producing our culture’s lack of empathy.

The play begins with owners Jeffrey and Dia Hotelman welcoming the new staff for the opening of their hotel, The Concept at The Hotelman Arms. They have two comical bellhops, Kaz and Harvey, and a perkily devoted upstairs concierge, Ella Elizondo. Three individual and outlandish guests arrive, demanding that Ella manage the shenanigans of both the guests and the staff. The guests each want something different: celebrity blogger BB wants to surround himself only with celebrities, the new YouTube sensation Rebecca arrives without knowing she is being drafted by a famous baseball team, and the covert novelist Shivery Delicious seeks the topic of her next book. As more people arrive it becomes clear that Rebecca is the focal desire for almost all of the characters because she is not only newly famous, but also holds the promise of financial gain for whomever drafts her.

John Stokvis (Kaz), Tawny Newsome (Ella Elizondo), and Theo Allyn (Mark Merriman) in The Upstairs Concierge. (Photo: Liz Lauren.)

As far as farce goes the production had it all. There were identity mix-ups, a faulty hall light, hidden elevators, secret closets, doors with no locks, a foam hotdog costume, and a lot of people undressing down to their underwear. A fingerprint of Diaz’s style is his brash critique of American consumerism across all strata of society, and his plays are designed for and cast with much diversity. But the actor/character’s race/ethnicity is not the platform from which the action is set; Diaz makes race a nonanalytic. With one of the most diverse casts I have seen in a prominent theatre, the people onstage looked like a cross-section of those walking around outside in downtown Chicago. But the play relied upon a barrage of references—Oprah Winfrey, Mike Ditka, Garrett Popcorn, multiple sports teams, and even a season subscription to the Goodman—to establish the Chicago setting rather than including characters who knew anything about Chicago other than these well-known brand names.

The entire production was a nearly nonstop verbal marathon, with no music or scene changes to break the building tension. There was only one sustained silence: when Shivery (Sandra Delgado) became convinced that Harvey (Gabriel Ruiz) wanted to communicate without words, she pantomimed the plot of her newest “novel.” Delgado’s nimble physicality and sense of comedic timing cohered in a lengthy silent narrative that was a compilation of every Hollywood cliché, mixed with some recognizable scenes from films such as King Kong, Star Wars, and Alien. It was every blockbuster rolled into one plotline, making the funniest segment in this world premiere play a visual montage of already-established “greatest moments.”

Although the characters were rarely alone, live, personal interaction proved a fruitless endeavor throughout, as each person who attempted to woo Rebecca failed. Physical presence was not enough to foster better relationships in a...