The George Washington Bridge has collapsed into the Hudson River. One of the tunnels into Manhattan has sprung a leak and filled with water. And the typical luxe condo on the island of Manhattan is now worth less than $50,000.

The urbane, well-heeled characters in Kristoffer Diaz’s absurdist black comedy “Things With Friends,” now in its world premiere at American Blues Theater under the direction of Dexter Bullard, say that they aren’t living through the apocalypse, but it’s clear that something pretty drastic has happened, given that New Jersey apparently has become the gateway to the world with the former self-professed center of the universe now cut off and well, unfamiliarly impotent.

A notion that always plays well in Chicago.

People can still get wine, cook steak and listen to Sonos in this imagined satirical world, but there’s a new fragility in their lives. The long-derided bridge-and-tunnel people, here represented by an aggressive couple played by Jon Hudson Odom and Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel, who have come to dinner in Manhattan at the home of characters played by Audrey Billings and Casey Campbell, now hold all the cards. As our narrator (Nate Santana) tells the tale, the adults of this new world order are even fighting over their young, represented by the outre Joony (Maya Lou Hlava), a young woman whose allegiances are as questionable as her future.

Climate change is never explicitly mentioned in Diaz’s drama, or at least not that I heard in a first production that could use fewer swallowed words and more crispness and clarity of language. But it’s the obvious assumption and, of course, an intriguing premise for a play by the author of the knockout made-in-Chicago play “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” and now the book writer for Broadway’s “Hell’s Kitchen.” Diaz is reaching for Edward Albee territory here, creating a lively and confident if, in the end, overly impenetrable black comedy with some echoes of both “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and “A Delicate Balance.”

The show certainly is a welcome return to what I’d deem significant theatrical events at American Blues, a company still finding its footing in its new Lincoln Avenue space. Bullard is what you might call an old-school Chicago director and the show has the city’s signature sardonic style and its famously intense mode of acting from a group of all-in performers.

But this also is a play that ultimately disappears into a dish of sweet potatoes, as an episode involving that particular vegetable takes over the whole shebang at the expense of much previously earned complexity. Alas, said sweet potatoes neither are funny nor especially revealing of theme. Not when given this much focus, anyway.

Audrey Billings, Maya Lou Hlava and Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel in “Things With Friends” by American Blues Theater. (Michael Brosilow)

No critic wants to be calling for the literal in a play like this, but Diaz certainly could take a gentle step or two away from the obliqueness abyss, especially in the later sections of a play that starts out much, much better than it ends. That late fizzle needs fixing, lest the metaphor collapse in on itself.  And while he’s working on what clearly is a first draft in need of work, Diaz might also inject more of the moment-by-moment tension that works so well when deftly employed, early on.

Bullard’s cast has fun on a witty, zoo cage-like Grant Sabin set, filled with the kind of art bought by Manhattanites “who have a budget for art,” snarks Santana’s narrator, clad in a Lin Manuel Miranda-like hat, poking fun at the underwater urban professionals from a Gotham in crisis.

But “Things with Friends” is a satire that lives and dies based on its language and manners and the ensemble has yet to convey a full enjoyment of the words, the snark and the hypocrisy. I’d give it a few more days before you go, but it’s already the kind of show — clever, unpredictable new work with promise! —  to which the city’s theater should make haste to return.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Review: “Things with Friends” (3 stars)

When: Through Oct 5

Where: American Blues Theater, 5627 N. Lincoln Ave.

Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Tickets: $34.50-$64.50 at 773-654-3103 and americanbluestheater.com

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/09/07/review-things-friends-american-blues/