The “Metropolitan Armageddon” We Just Missed

If you missed Things With Friends at Alleyway Theatre, you missed a production that understood exactly how to hold an audience in the palm of its hand — through precision, playfulness, and a kind of controlled chaos that never once lost its grip.

Written by Kristoffer Diaz in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy’s devastating impact on New York State, the play imagines a near-possible future where infrastructure is failing and uncertainty hums just beneath the surface of everyday life. In this world, the George Washington Bridge has collapsed, the Battery Tunnel is destroyed, and the storm of the century may be on its way. And still — people gather for dinner.

That tension between the catastrophic and the casual is where Diaz’s writing thrives. The play doesn’t rush toward disaster; it lets it sit in the room, like an uninvited guest no one wants to acknowledge. Adele and Burt host their friends Chabby and Vy for what begins as a familiar evening — steak, wine, long-standing relationships — but quickly reveals itself to be something far more unsettling. What unfolds is not just the breakdown of a city, but the exposure of the fragile agreements we call friendship, loyalty, and love.

Under the direction of Chris Handley, the production was strikingly easy to watch. And that ease is not accidental — it is crafted. Handley’s staging moved with a fluidity that kept the story alive at every moment. Nothing felt stagnant. Nothing felt forced. Instead, the action unfolded with a kind of choreographed precision that made even the most absurd or heightened moments land cleanly. Paired with the narrated stage directions delivered by Smirna Mercedes, the play often tipped into something resembling a live-action cartoon for adults — bold, stylized, and unapologetically theatrical, always ready to invite laughter even as the stakes escalated.

And the audience did laugh. A lot. Because the humor here isn’t separate from the danger — it’s braided into it.

Mercedes, acting as both narrator and self-identified “playwright,” anchored the piece with an effortless command of tone. She guided the audience without ever over-explaining, allowing us to stay just disoriented enough to remain curious. That balance — between clarity and unpredictability — was one of the production’s greatest strengths.

The ensemble met that energy with specificity and control. Shanntina Moore’s Vy arrived fully formed, polished and perceptive, with vocal choices that immediately defined her status and sensibility. Opposite her, Stan Klimecko’s Chabby leaned into physical storytelling in a way that made even mundane actions feel loaded; his transformation of eating into something indulgent, almost unsettling, became a quiet highlight. Sarah French grounded Adele with a steady emotional presence, allowing the audience to track the shifting reality through her acceptance and restraint, while David C. Mitchell’s Burt simmered with a tension that suggested unraveling just beneath the surface — never too much, but always enough to keep us watching closely. And Sunny Griffith introduced a needed shift in perspective, offering a lens that felt both outside of and deeply affected by the world the adults were negotiating.

What made this production especially exciting, though, was not just the performances or the text — it was the environment. Technical Director Emma Schimminger once again transformed Alleyway Theatre into something entirely new. There is a particular thrill in walking into that space knowing that it will not look the way it did the last time you were there. That sense of surprise — of not knowing what you’re about to encounter — mirrored the experience of the play itself.

And then there’s the craftsmanship.

Water ran from the sink. Light shifted gradually into night. And when the storm arrived, it arrived fully — rain falling inside the theater in a moment that felt both technically astonishing and theatrically joyful. Whatever had to happen behind the scenes to make that possible, it is the kind of bold, high-level execution that keeps audiences coming back. Schimminger’s work here wasn’t just impressive — it was immersive, and it expanded what felt possible within that space.

Things With Friends ultimately asked its audience to sit with discomfort: to consider how quickly civility erodes, how conditional generosity can be, how survival reshapes morality. But it never did so in a way that pushed people away. Instead, it drew them in — through humor, through movement, through spectacle, through surprise.

And that is exactly why it’s worth paying attention to what Alleyway Theatre does next.

Because if this production proved anything, it’s that this creative team understands how to build an experience — not just a play. One where you walk in curious, sit in suspense, laugh when you least expect it, and leave still turning things over in your mind.

If you missed this one, let that be the lesson.

Next time, get your ticket early. alleyway.com‍