Review: DODI & DIANA at Mosaic Theater Company

What makes a luxury hotel room? Creamy hues, gold accents, floor-to-ceiling windows replete with heavy, textured drapes — all the trimmings and trappings that pile up on one side of an equation that eventually equals the thing that the popular subconscious recognizes as luxury. Nevermind that the dresser is only particleboard, or that the fixtures are only brass finished, or the spot of gunk on the underside of the molding, or walls so thin you can hear the children two rooms down discovering the jacuzzi feature. Luxury, like any other construct, is something that is performed.  

It’s the same dream dust that powers theater sets. From one side: cheap plywood weighed down with sandbags. From the other: a castle, or a dungeon, or an elegant, €2,000-a-night room. Puff at a folding fan with enough conviction and we’ll see a pipe; point at a star map with enough resoluteness and we’ll see our fortune. 

In Dodi & Diana, married couple Jason (Jake Loewenthal) and Samira (Dina Soltan) are holed up in a room at the Ritz Paris for seventy-two hours on the orders of Jason’s astrologer, who says that they are to be completely isolated from the outside world for the duration, with no one else allowed in the room and no phones, no TV, even no opening the window curtains. And one more thing, Jason and Samira are astrologically linked to Dodi Fayed and Princess Diana, who died in a car crash after departing this same hotel exactly twenty-five years earlier. 

This premise of this play is electric. What Jason’s astrologist has prescribed has a name: torture. It’s solitary confinement — with a plus one. The very idea of it is intoxicating, promising the escalating tension and spiraling undoing of God of Carnage, American Son, Bad Jews, and the like. 

Dodi & Diana is nothing like that. Jason and Samira serve out their seventy-two-hour sentence in an aimless dawdle, endlessly expositing to each other in encyclopedic detail about their character backgrounds—where they come from, what they do for a living, how the two met—and relentlessly hinting at the usual marital woes you’d expect from a couple in a one-room play. 

The real trouble is that playwright Kareem Fahmy’s concept begs for a deft touch. A tense and thrilling highwire act that lives in long moments and minute details. That fully delves into what a relationship of ten years feels like from the inside — the martyred looks, cryptic sighs, sullen glares, you get it. A brutally honest slow-motion descent as the superficial layers of comfort and habit and status quo are peeled back, exposing the ugly hidden truths that have built up over years and shared bank accounts and mortgages and seventy-five pound dogs. 

But Dodi & Diana is, from the very outset, louder and brasher and more melodramatic than any of that. Loewenthal and Soltan don’t set a foot wrong throughout the ninety-minute runtime, but Mosaic’s Artistic Director Reginald L. Douglas’ direction has them literally prancing across the stage, rolling around on the furniture, and never amounting to more than thin, easily summed up caricatures. They are never allowed to subtly suggest, implicitly imply, to do anything other than emphatically gestate and explicitly announce. 

Jason is a highly successful finance bro, originally from Canada, who attempts to bury his insecurities with fad diets and rigorous workouts. Samira, an Egyptian actress with a master’s from Yale School of Drama, is wrestling with frustrations that her recent TV breakthrough came in the form of an offensively stereotypical role as a muslim terrorist. 

There is, ostensibly, love and affection and respect between the two, but there are also the far too expected cracks in the surface. He feels she’s away too much for work, she’s conflicted about how his privileged background and line of work contrast with her politics and identity. He seems to want children more than she does. And, told in little breadcrumbs dispersed throughout the play, there is the issue of a certain secret Jason is keeping from Samira. 

Which is, barring the specifics of what that certain secret is, really all there is to it. Dodi & Diana stubbornly refuses to further delve or complicate anything. The strands stay loose and disconnected, the characters stagnate, and potential points of interest only ever pop in for a brief introductory hello before never being seen again. 

We are drip fed knowing hint after knowing hint about Jason’s sexuality, which turns out to be a red herring. Samira speaks passionately about how being muslim impacts her work, but she is quickly offered her dream role (a fantastical five-year contract to co-lead alongside Adam Driver in a series filming exclusively in New Zealand) and these concerns are never heard of again. Jason, a presumably busy Wall Street financier, mentions the economy just the once, checking the paper to say that the market is doing fine and that he can easily go a full three days without his phone or computer. The pandemic is also brought up only once, with Jason referring to it as an opportunity for partners to share some quality time — Samira seems to have somehow been traveling throughout the lockdowns. 

Despite being the entire motivation for the seventy-two hour conceit, neither the characters or the play seem to take a genuine interest in astrology beyond the little beats placed at regularly scheduled intervals throughout the show in which Jason or Samira toss out some jargon the audience clearly need not understand. 

Even the Dodi and Diana angle is underbaked, starting with a Wikipedia-esque summary of the accident and ending with a corny dramatization of what their last conversation might have been that feels straight out of a made-for-TV biopic. These versions of Dodi and Diana are not complete enough to serve as revealing foils or doubles of Jason and Samira, and Fahmy’s somewhat curious assertion that the wildly successful, wealthy and connected Fayed has been “erased from history” aside, nothing in the work itself is actually done to rectify that. 

Topical issues are similarly raised and immediately discarded, as if Fahmy is working through the progressive theater checklist. Privilege, identity politics, ethnic erasure, racism, classism, sexuality, gender — nothing is ever In Focus long enough for it to take any real hold in the narrative. Jumpiness is embedded in the very pacing of the show; Dodi & Diana is broken into little scenes that end abruptly, leading into long scene changes accompanied by strobing lights and pulsing music. 

This lack of grounding, of immersion, of commitment permeates every aspect of the production. Scenic designer Shartoya R. Jn. Baptiste has designed an expansive and encompassing Ritz Paris hotel room that uses the Atlas Performing Arts Center’s Sprenger Theatre blackbox well. It stays mostly static throughout the seventy-two hours, though.

The dishes and bottles fail to pile up, and what few dishes there are appear spotless. The bed stays stain free, the floor collects no crumbs. Jason and Samira both manage to keep their hair perfect, their skin doesn’t break out. There is no detail in the production. The light coming from outside the window is one-dimensional — in a show all about the stars. The soundscape doesn’t place us in the confinement of a hotel room. It does not feel like seventy-two hours are passing, it doesn’t come close to capturing what seventy-two hours trapped with no windows or outside communication or real air would feel like. There is no sensory backing to support that same je ne sais quoi that James Baldwin captures so powerfully in Giovanni’s Room: that of a relationship falling apart under the weight of a small, claustrophobic room in Paris. 

In a pre-taped announcement before the show, Kareem Fahmy referred to Dodi & Diana as a bold new play that speaks to the world today, but the world of Dodi & Diana feels barely related to our own, be it today's or yesterday's or ten years ago's. It’s a world of dream jobs and not having to check Outlook every half hour while out of office and five million dollar townhouses and €2,000-a-night hotel rooms and a harmless pandemic. 

Or maybe it’s close enough. What makes a bold new play, after all? Maybe this one has all the necessary trimmings and trappings to sufficiently perform whatever boldness and newness and topicality mean in a play.