Audrey Billings, Casey Campbell, Nate Santana, Jon Hudson Odom, and Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel Photo by Michael Brosilow

The key to Things With Friends' critique of American rapacity is its structure. The play is constructed like a nesting doll. The innermost part is a tried-and-true staple of the American theatre that will be immediately familiar to most audience members. It's a piece of capital-R Realism about one couple, Adele and Burt, hosting their friends Vy and Chabby for a dinner party. Adele and Burt live on the 27th floor of a Manhattan apartment building. Their friends, who have recently left the city for New Jersey, hope to persuade–or is it force?–Adele and Burt to do likewise. Their lovely evening is complicated by the city's infrastructure giving out amidst the increasing effects of climate change: the George Washington Bridge has collapsed into the Hudson River and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel has flooded. Throughout the party, we see suggestions that these disasters are causing civil society to break down on Manhattan.

Further plot summary would dull the piece's impact, but suffice to say the dinner party plot has everything you'd expect in such a play. The characters eat and drink too much, and the alcohol lowers inhibitions about airing grievances. Machinations unfold and motives become unclear. An additional character arrives, throwing things into chaos. The two couples jockey for power and an unexpected reversal evens the score.

This may all sound fairly stale; the form is well-trod enough that there's a joke in Oh, Hello about how the modern American theatre is just people yelling at each other. What separates Things With Friends from dozens of similar dinner-party plays is the outer nesting doll: the presence of a narrator called NYC who describes the action as it happens onstage, gives insight into the characters' inner thoughts and emotions, and serves as the Virgil to the audience's Dante on this trip down into hell.

The show works as well as it does thanks to Nate Santana's performance as NYC. He's spirited and engaging, moving throughout the space with a lightness that feels supernatural. His narration is unobtrusive but interrupts the narrative to achieve a Brechtian attitude for the production. So, what might be just another 90 minutes worth of five people yelling at each other rises to another level.

Grant Sabin's set is likewise crucial to the overall meaning. The apartment is sleek and modern, filled with granite countertops and dark wood cabinets. It's the kind of uncluttered space that reflects the anodyne, frictionless world late capitalism promises as the reward for operating within its system. It's limned with white curtains that the cast opens when the show begins. These curtains subtly separate the world of the characters from NYC as he guides us through the pressure-packed evening. They offer director Dexter Bullard a chance to stage the show's climactic, arresting visual image, with two of the characters trapped in the apartment, framed by billowing curtains as a storm bears down on Manhattan.

Ultimately, Things With Friends is a play of ideas. The performances are finely wrought, it's staged with fleet and captivating brio, and the visual and design elements are all clean and sharp. But outside all those clean, exactingly structured surfaces is a city and a world in turmoil. Adele and Burt want to stay put and regrow the community; Vy and Chabby want to burn it down and profit from the collapse. Both think they can control their destiny, but that's impossible in the face of natural forces that are untameable.

The old saw about the role of the writer is that their job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. This play offers precious little comfort, but plenty of affliction for those willing to open themselves to it. Because the waters are rising, and if we're not careful, nothing will stop them.

Things With Friends runs through October 5, 2025, at American Blues Theatre, 5627 N. Lincoln Avenue, Chicago IL. Performances are Thursday-Friday at 7:30pm, Saturdays at 3:00 or 7:00pm and Sundays at 2:30pm with select Wednesdays. For tickets and information, please visit americanbluestheater.com or call the box office at 773-654-3103.