With three productions on and off Broadway this season, John Patrick Shanley completists are enjoying a field day. Danny and the Deep Blue Sea and Doubt are reruns of widely spaced vintage (1983 and 2004). Brooklyn Laundry alone is brand-new. If only it felt that way.
Cecily Strong brings star power to this handsome production (scenic designer Santo Loquasto has gone all out, filling the Manhattan Theatre Club’s revolving stage with no fewer than four highly detailed, distinctive setlets). Strong seems oddly miscast, though, as Fran, a 37-year-old office drone whom the 50-ish laundromat manager/owner Owen (David Zayas) immediately pegs as “gloomy.”
Fran is definitely presenting as depressed, and more than a bit combative: When Owen credits divine intervention for the chain of disastrous events that vaulted him from corporate-office purgatory to entrepreneurship, as the owner of three drop-off laundries, she’s skeptical: “You don’t really believe in God, do you?” Rude.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
The search for a long-unclaimed dry-cleaning item opens the door to further debate and revelations. Against all odds, the two soon start bonding – to the point of agreeing to a date. Owen is the first to reach out: “I felt a pinch,” he confesses, cutely embodying the sensation as he admits to the attraction.
Well, why not? Even in the shapeless burgundy office dress and comfortable shoes appropriately assigned by costume designer Suzy Benzinger, and despite her grim affect (nothing unusual in a New Yorker), Fran is obviously a lurking beauty – like one of those old-fashioned movie ingenues who need only toss their frumpy glasses.
In a later scene – a vine-draped patio restaurant set atwinkle with fairy lights – Fran looks preppy and peppy. On the advice of an officemate who has been faulting her for “manifesting” (rendering her pessimism a self-fulfilling prophecy), Fran has just taken her first hallucinogen, chocolate mushrooms – so against type, and yet not. Owen gamely swallows a dose, and their ensuring mutual enchantment is pretty adorable – even if Owen feels compelled to confess off the bat the sexual difficulties that have plagued him ever since the accident that made him rich. “I’m afraid to try,” he says. (At all? Even solo?) Fran is keen to administer aid: “I can help you maybe … if you let me.” It’s hard not to interpret her gung-ho, hands-on attitude as a chimera of male fantasy.
In between the pair’s initial encounters, Shanley’s script takes a detour to rural Pennsylvania, where Fran’s sister Trish (Florencia Lozano) lies impoverished and bedridden in a wood-paneled double-wide trailer, which Loquasto has inexplicably rendered as luxurious as a modern robber baron’s private railroad car. Trish sets aside her oxygen tube long enough to deliver a paean to her unremarkable life – “I’m not going to be in the history books” – and urges her younger sister to “Do what you have to do. Make your move. Live.” One needn’t be stone-hearted to perceive the scene as mawkish, and Lozano milks the opp for all it’s worth.
In contrast, Andrea Syglowski (memorable for her recent star turn in Teresa Rebeck’s Dig) is refreshingly astringent as middle sister Susie. In a fourth scene, set in Fran’s appropriately drab studio apartment, Susie is determined to get Fran to return to Pennsylvania with her before Trish, now in a coma, succumbs. Fran strenuously resists: she doesn’t want to jinx her nascent (three-week-old) relationship with Owen.
What is so wrong with Fran that she’s so desperate to couple up at all costs? She has latched on to this barely-there pairing like a barnacle. It takes a chisel of a reveal on Susie’s part to pry Fran loose.
By this point in the play, a certain soapish quality has bubbled up. Daytime dramas are made of such material, and despite occasional flights of originality on Shanley’s part, similar territory has been explored in depth elsewhere with greater finesse.
As is clear from his oeuvre to date, Shanley enjoys exploring the extremes of human experience as experienced by slightly broken people. As Fran confesses toward the end, “I wasn’t built for these dramatic things.”
Neither, unfortunately, is her regrettably retro character arc. If the disjunct between Fran’s contemporary mindset and dated expectations weren’t enough, Owen’s reaction to Fran’s eleventh-hour reveal –”You can’t expect me to … sign on to this” — would mark him, in the current climate, as unacceptably unevolved. You can count on Shanley, however, to pull off an uplifting denouement.
Brooklyn Laundry opened February 28, 2024, at City Center Stage I and runs through April 14. Tickets and information: manhattantheatreclub.com
