Ah, Switzerland. Home of chocolate, cleanliness, secret bank accounts, beautiful scenery, lonely wanderers, studied neutrality and a carefully veiled past. What might it be like to stare into one of its hotel rooms? Things go from there: We meet all kinds of couplings and triplings, both professional and personal, encompassing everything from frolicking kids to a depressed senior to a melancholy one-night stand to a banker who may not be what he seems.
Watching them all is the maid, a woman who speaks three languages, a linguistic trifecta still inadequate to express all her depth of feeling. This work β seen off-Broadway this past spring β hardly is the first play to use the device of disparate characters moving in and out of the same space. It understands that the only thing sadder than a night in a business hotel is a night in a business hotel while fighting jet lag.
And it deftly exploits how we all wonder what messes are made behind closed doors. Some of the casting does not feel right to me although Elizabeth Wigley is dead-on as the unnamed maid, as is Debo Balogun as the unnamed Guy , and the staging choices do not do enough to embody the crucial tension in the script between the quotidian and the sinister. That would need far more depth in each and every scene. A great theater city deserves a great theater critic.
Enter Chris Jones. By Chris Jones cjones5 chicagotribune. More in Theater.
