“we, the invisibles” tells a story of hospitality workers who keep the earth spinning

Businessmen, celebrities, politicians and the elites of New York City scurry in and out of the Sofitel hotel in Manhattan — the backdrop for the USC School of Dramatic Arts’ production of “we, the invisibles.”

The gentry attend conferences, conventions, parties; they come into town for politics and business — sometimes leisure when they pick up dates at the hotel bar. Somehow, though, the hotel’s busiest group walks about unnoticed and unheard: its staff. That is, until our narrator, the Sofitel’s manager, Susan, steps in and begins introducing us one-by-one to the true movers and shakers at the hotel.

Stylized as a story told in first-person from the perspective of playwright Susan Soon He Stanton, the play follows the case of Nafissatou Diallo, a real-life former housekeeper at the Sofitel, who accused French presidential hopeful and head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, of brutally sexually assaulting her in his room in 2011.

The character of Susan, the playwright Susan and the play itself all center on Diallo. Susan the character has worked at this hotel for much longer than she had hoped, even after attending graduate school to become a playwright. The playwright Susan even went so far as to take a job at the Sofitel to attempt to interview Diallo.

It’s also no coincidence that this story was told at USC now. Coming on the heels of protests for living wages for custodians at the university, the power imbalances that exist in these cities of industry and places where society’s wealthiest people gather are front of mind during the show.

“These stories are not unlike the stories of the janitors, cooks, and other workers at many of the establishments and institutions we patronize and work at…much like USC…who remain invisible to those of us privileged to enjoy the university’s benefits,” the artistic team writes in the program notes.

These stories do ring true when compared to the instances that have occurred at USC: in April of 2022, a custodian was accused of stealing a backpack while on campus. While Diallo left the hotel in the case of Strauss-Kahn, the USC custodian was fired.

While the piece starts and ends with Susan’s story, what was meant to be a closer look at one instance of the abuse of power over society’s most vulnerable turns into a mosaic. Susan takes us through the small, anecdotal stories of the hotel’s employees, and by the end of the performance, the audience sees a fuller, more vibrant picture of what it means to be an invisible part of elite New York high society.

The cast of “we, the invisibles” does a phenomenal job capturing the lives, friendships and tragedies of the hotel staff. The show’s 19-person cast plays more than 60 characters, including immigrant workers who run the bar and restaurants, housekeeping services and human resources. Not to mention the depiction of politician Strauss-Kahn as a sort of villain who returns throughout the show to remind Susan what the elite are capable of.

“The characters are based on real people, and the play attempts to tell their stories,” the artistic team writes. “Some of the characters are based on verbatim interviews; some are told from memory; some are dramatized or come from combinations of stories.”

Soon He Stanton reportedly conducted dozens of interviews with her co-workers from all corners of the globe to put this story together, and thus the play is chock full of anecdotes about the lives of various workers. Waitresses argue with chefs in the hotel dining room about whose role is harder, immigrants from around the world recount how and why they made their way to New York, and tensions arise between supervisorial staff and the people that report to them. The audience hears accounts of housekeepers who were separated from their children during immigration, their security guard’s dreams of becoming a police officer being shot down because of his disability, and even in one particularly tense moment, Susan herself imagines what might happen if she let a man through hotel security who may have been attempting to harm a conference room full of pharmaceutical executives.

Despite the tremendous work of the ensemble, Diallo remains at the center of the picture Susan paints. Almost framed as a detective working to solve a mystery, Susan asks anyone she suspects who knew of Diallo’s whereabouts. She speaks to reporters familiar with the case and attempts to find her online. At the same time, Susan makes references to the hate and something of a smear campaign that Diallo faced in the media, suggesting she lied about her attack, taking a brief pause to have the cast read out comments posted online about the Senegalese worker, most of them filled with hate speech and horrific language.

By the end of the play, we learn of Diallo’s new life away from the hotel industry. She owns a cafe in New York, and she and Susan don’t speak about the attack, but about what’s good on the menu instead. (Criminal charges against Strauss-Kahn were dropped, but he later settled a civil suit that had been brought by Diallo.)

“we, the invisibles” is a story of money and power and how these things are used to abuse the hardest working people in society. At its emotional core are the people like Diallo — the people who keep the world turning despite everything they’ve been through.

“we, the invisibles” ran from Nov. 10 through 20 at the Scene Dock Theatre.