Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

Carol Rosegg ©2025  Ann Hu (Mitsumi Yoshida) and Marc Carver (Bill Watertsand)

The Bilbao Effect is one of the most hilarious satires this season. The 90-minute play is about the world we live in and how influences us and is Oren Safdie’s second installment in a trilogy on architecture. This time the playwright takes us into an arbitration hearing between a famous architect and a local resident whose life has been ruined by a new development project.

The title of play takes its name from the city in Spain that saw its economy and international status turned around due to Frank Gehry shimmering Guggenheim building. An entire community of deluxe hotels, boutiques, and nouveau rich class has sprung up around Gehry’s masterpiece. Bilbao, Spain is now one of the must-see international destinations for arts fans and architecture aficionado. Since then, dozens of cities around the world every year try to outdo each other with outrageous new buildings by so-called ‘starchitect’ divas with bold visions and little patience for the minor complaints of local residents.

If you live in any major metropolitan city in the world, you’re aware of the “Bilbao Effect” and Safdie exploits the urban resident’s ambivalence toward the constant news of the spectacular buildings. On the one hand we may look at these buildings and admire the creativity and the ‘wow factor.’ On the other hand, the admiration is often accompanied with a slight grumble about costs, practicality, and basic comforts.

The fictional controversy revolves around a monstrous 1,200 acre complex called the Staten Island Waterside Urban Renewal Redevelopment. Erhardt Shlaminger is the starchitect defendant whose foreign accent, sneering gaze, and high-flung, pompous philosophies on art bare all the marks of elitism. Joris Stuyck nails Erhardt as both someone who hates people, but loves the idea of ‘mankind.’

Carol Rosegg ©2025  Ann Hu (Mitsumi Yoshida), Marc Carver (Bill Watertsand) and Joris Stuyck (Erhardt Shlaminger)

Despite the intellectual nature of writing a trilogy on contemporary architecture, Safdie makes sure that The Bilbao Effect is ripe with absurd characters, overblown conspiracy theories, and court-room antics that keep raising the tension with each minute.

The play starts off slow but quickly picks up steam. As the jokes start landing, you can feel the actors come into their comfort-zone and the director find his pace. The last half of the play goes into warp speed insanity. Everyone becomes unhinged and the result is apocalyptic slapstick conclusion that is on par with the best of the Marx Brothers. It may seem like an odd way to end such well-measured satire on an important topic, but Safdie –much like his fictional starchitect- isn’t as much concerned with structural practicality of his play as he is with getting the ‘wow factor.’

The Bilbao Effect is being produced at the Center for Architecture, an intimate space that has drawings and models of the all the future outrageous buildings that are in construction and planning phase around the world. Afterward many of the people in the audience hung around in the lobby to look at the buildings we will be living in. And that’s the joy of Safdie’s amazing play: it gets us to look again at our surroundings so that we debate, laugh, and become more present in our homes, offices, and our lives.