Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?
Hint... It's not Sidney Poitier
We are making up our own characters based on the Buñuel characters. But the thing is, Buñuel doesn't have characters, and he doesn't have plot, which is why we are having difficulty. But David Ives is creating characters based on those...
...They are in a situation. They are slightly defined by the situation. They represent a certain aspect of society. That's why we call it The Discreet Charm of the Bourgoisie. These are the American versions of the French bourgeoisie - you know, the movers, moneyed people, people in power. The social animals. The well-off. The equivalent of the beau monde people. We have fashioned them after certain people who are in newspapers.
-Sondheim ( 147-152 Finale D.T. Max)
Though they remain cartoonish, the characters of Here We Are certainly are more dimensional than the non-characters of the Buñuel (btw, the keystroke for that is Alt+0241 in case you don't want to keep Character Map open, though in retrospect I suspect I'm one of the few oldheads that learned to use character map for the é in Pokémon [Alt+0233, if you're curious]) films that they have been adapted from. While The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and Exterminating Angel (1962) do not share a set of characters, we follow the same "core six plus five" from Here We Are's adaptation of Discreet Charm in Act One through to its adaptation of Exterminating Angel in Act Two.
The cast resembles that of Discreet Charm, albeit modernized, Americanized and slightly shifted to serve the needs of the play. Please be aware that insofar as this story can have spoilers there will be spoilers throughout this discussion from this point out and I'm not going to be marking them, so prepare accordingly.
Core Six
Leo Brink (Bobby Cannavale)
A slick real estate developer, the purse strings and de facto leader of the "Core Six," Leo was not born rich, but rather parlayed a small sum of money he stole after murdering a couple in his youth into his current fortune. Despite his sordid backstory, he's still charming and schmoozy. He attempts benevolence but doesn't quite get it right - he builds a "park for the people," but does so by uprooting virgin forest and transplanting it. Oh, and he, Rafael and Paul are smuggling cocaine through the Morandan embassy, but more on that later.
Marianne Brink (Rachel Bay Jones)
The "interior designer without an interior," Leo’s wife Marianne Brink breezes through life eager to explore all of the wonderful things she can see. Since we know her sibling, Fritz, has a trust fund we can assume that the same is true of Marianne and that she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. She's such a dreamy person she remains in her negligée (hey look, that alt+0233 came in handy again!) throughout the play.
Fritz (Micaela Diamond)
Marianne's genderfluid sibling, we meet Fritz while they're male-presenting (bristling at the rest of the group calling them "Fritzi" and "Francis", presumably from earlier identities that have since been discarded). Fritz doesn't let the fact that they're a member of a secret terrorist group called PRADA (not the shoe) that seeks to "destroy capitalism" to stop them from having brunch with their sister and her rich friends, though she does take the opportunity to harangue them.
Raffael Santello Di Santicci (Steven Pasquale)
The ambassador of "Mediterranean shithole" Moranda, Raffael is a man as passionate as the nation he.. embasses... I guess. He takes every opportunity to chase skirts (or whatever Fritz is wearing) and runs a cocaine smuggling ring through the use of diplomatic pouches which sound fake, but they're real things and honestly super interesting? As far as the affairs go, the only person who appears to have taken the bait is Claudia, whom he entertains at the embassy on... Tuesdays, apparently.
Paul Zimmer (Jeremy Shamos)
A successful plastic surgeon, Paul has a milestone coming up - his 1000th nose job. He and his wife Claudia have children but don't seem to talk about them very much.
Claudia Bursik-Zimmer (Amber Gray)
An agent for a "major entertainment entity," Claudia Bursik-Zimmer spends her time either barking orders at people she believes to be better than or fluffing her own accomplishments to people she believes to be better than her. Well, that and sleeping with Rafael. On Tuesdays, apparently.
