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'Zurich': At this hotel, room service comes with a bang

NEW YORK — “Very nice and clean,” says the pretty maid with the artificial smile, speaking with the scripted sunniness of a corporate employee.

But don’t assume that the standards of moral hygiene are anywhere near as high for those who inhabit this dark, teasingly contrived comedy.

The 10 characters in “Zurich,” directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt in a polished Colt Coeur production, are human beings of the 21st century. They are, at best, a mess and, at worst, moral cesspools, polluted by greed, lust for power, political corruption and a system built on what one character refers to as “toxic masculinity.”

Described in the program as “an Australian-American writer and activist,” Roper lends a bracingly astringent perspective to life as we know it today. Even the children who scamper through her play — which takes place in a series of interchangeable rooms on the 40th floor of a luxury hotel — seem somehow tainted.

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“Zurich” takes what might be called a terrorist approach to the classic omnibus comedies associated with the likes of Alan Ayckbourn and Neil Simon. I mean those plays in which disparate (and often desperate) lives, portrayed in separate scenes, turn out to be linked by both theme and circumstance.

Roper presents these lives through a weary, fed-up God’s-eye-view. In John McDermott’s impeccable set a pane of glass separates the audience from the 10 characters. (The design work — including sound design by Brendan Aanes and lighting by Grant Yeager — is first-rate throughout.)

It is no accident that the majority of the characters are American or that the show begins with a hung over, half-naked banker (Paul Wesley, late of “The Vampire Diaries”) bellowing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In what follows, various men and women (as well as one boy and two girls) embody an implicit, uneasy power struggle that often hinges on sex.

A sparkling cast has been assembled to play out these unsavory encounters. Its members include Wesley and Juliana Canfield as a couple blearily waking up from a one-night stand; Austin Smith as a self-disgusted businessman, who confides in and bullies a hotel maid, wittily played by Carolyn Holding; and the excellent Samantha Cutler and Gregory Diaz IV as a restless pubescent sister and her younger brother parked in their parents’ room.

Rounding out the ensemble are Renata Friedman as a German woman trying to track down the bank account of her grandmother, a Holocaust victim, and Sammi Molly Bray, 10, as her distracting daughter; and Lynne Lipton and Matthew Stadelmann as an old woman and her caretaker, who have apparently fled a nursing home.

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Though “Zürich” has been carefully structured, individual scenes still need rigorous editing. It sometimes feels as if the actors were given situational stereotypes to embody and then told to improvise variations on subjects like “male abuses of power” and “economic entrapment.”

And despite the committed performances of the cast members, their characters too often seem like prisoners not only of a corrupt social order, but also of a pedagogical vision.

It’s not just that dividing glass wall that inhibits our empathy for these querulous figures. You can understand the temptation, expressed by two of the characters here, to want to blow these blighted specimens of humanity to kingdom come.

As the play proceeds, such an act of violence feels increasingly possible. Be warned: Each of the show’s five scenes ends, most appropriately, with a boom and a blackout.

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Production Notes:

‘Zurich’

Through May 5 at Next Door at NYTW, Manhattan; 212-460-5475, nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.

By Amelia Roper; directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt; sets by John McDermott; costumes by Tilly Grimes; lights by Grant Yeager; sound by Brendan Aanes; props by Samantha Shoffner; production stage manager, Katie Cecil Cairns; production manager/technical director, Daniel Prosky, associate producer, Shannon Buhler. Presented by Colt Coeur.

Cast: Paul Wesley (He), Juliana Canfield (She), Austin Smith (Guy), Carolyn Holding (Maid), Samantha Cutler (Girl), Gregory Diaz IV (Boy), Renata Friedman (Emily), Sami Molly Bray (Fryda), Lynne Lipton (One) and Matthew Stadelmann (Two).

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

BEN BRANTLEY © 2018 The New York Times

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