Playwright Kristoffer Diaz first began thinking about the ideas behind his latest work, Things with Friends, during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. He vividly recalls watching his young child have a play date in their Brooklyn neighborhood while the rain was pounding against the apartment windows. This juxtaposition of everyday life with a large-scale catastrophe lies at the heart of the Tony Award-and Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer’s new play, premiering at Chicago’s American Blues Theater from now through October 5.
Directed by Dexter Bullard, Things with Friends is Diaz’s take on a common trope that he describes as “rich people sitting on a couch drinking wine” plays. In an upscale Manhattan apartment, married couple Burt (Casey Campbell) and Adele (Audrey Billings) prepare to host a dinner party with their old friends, Chabby (Jon Hudson Odom) and Vy (Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel). Outside their window, the George Washington Bridge has recently collapsed, severing a main artery between New York and New Jersey. Meanwhile, the rain keeps coming.
In some ways, the play is about climate change, but its themes could apply to any number of modern crises. Diaz aims to explore “how ridiculous it is that we go on about our lives while something else is happening outside,” he says. “It feels like once a week, my wife and I are sitting and having a conversation about, ‘How are we doing the thing that we’re doing when X is going on in the world right now?’ When there’s famine and genocide and climate change and whatever is going on in the world, we just have to go on about our lives.”
With elements of a comedy and a thriller, Things with Friends resists categorization, and this ambiguity is part of what drew Bullard to the script. As a director, he believes in letting audience members encounter a show without preconceived expectations, instead allowing their individual perspectives to shape their responses. “I think the brilliance of most American writing is the idea that there is total complexity,” Bullard said. “Life is totally complex.”
In addition to blending genres, Diaz experiments with form by including a narrator, played by Nate Santana, who delivers the stage directions as spoken dialogue throughout the play. With wry humor and a self-deprecating tone, Santana provides commentary on the characters, setting, and plot, creating a metatheatrical third rail. The addition of a narrator also allows for the compression and stretching of time; for example, actions that would take only a few seconds in real life can unfold more slowly onstage when narrated by this “literary voice,” notes Bullard.
A primary question raised by the play, says Diaz, is, “What does it mean to be merciful in the face of impending doom?” The four main characters, who all “think that they’re being very altruistic,” wrestle with whom to help, and how, as climate change threatens their homes and livelihoods. “Setting this play at a dinner party is a way to play with those weightier ideas in a less intense kind of way,” Diaz elaborates. “Nobody in this play is on the brink of starvation. These people live in a beautiful home, and they’re having steak and they’re drinking wine. It’s hopefully a way to use that familiar kind of setting to get after some of those bigger ideas and then find out what happens when those screws turn more and more and more over the course of the evening.”
Though the play is set in New York City, it’s fitting that its world premiere takes place in Chicago, where Diaz had his first career breakthrough in 2009. After earning an MFA from New York University, he spent seven years writing and developing plays before Victory Gardens Theater produced his first fully staged work, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, which is set in the world of professional wrestling. A major hit in Chicago and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the show transferred to New York’s Second Stage Theatre in 2010 and has since been produced more than 40 times in the United States.
“Everything that’s happened for my career afterwards came directly out of that,” says Diaz. In the years since, he has worked as a screenwriter and musical librettist, and he currently teaches at New York University. Most notably, he spent 13 years working with Alicia Keys on her semi-autobiographical musical, Hell’s Kitchen, which premiered on Broadway in 2024 and earned Diaz a Tony Award nomination for best book of a musical. The show’s first national tour will come to Chicago in November.
A native New Yorker, Diaz is a former resident playwright with Teatro Vista, a Chicago-based Latine theater company, and recently became an artistic affiliate at American Blues Theater. He has returned to Chicago for several productions throughout his career, including the 2015 world premiere of The Upstairs Concierge at the Goodman Theatre, and has developed lifelong relationships through these collaborations. “I consider myself a Chicago playwright, even though I’ve never actually lived here. It’s a magical, magical place.”
