John Patrick Shanley’s latest play begins with a tentative connection between two lonely middle-aged people, Fran (Cecily Strong), who brings her latest bag of dirty laundry to the neighborhood cleaners, and Owen (David Zayas), the store’s owner. Fran has had a bad day, and it doesn’t help that the cleaners lost a previous bag of her laundry. Still, there’s apparently some kind of spark there, because Owen invites her out to dinner. He tells her she reminds him of his ex-fiancé: “Smart, one inch from terrific, but gloomy.”
“I don’t think I’m gloomy,” Fran replies tartly. “I think what I’m suffering from is reality.”
That reality only gets gloomier for Fran, and more contrived for the audience, as Shanley strives for a mix of romantic comedy and family drama in “Brooklyn Laundry,” which had a mixed critical response when it opened a month ago. I’ve only now gotten to see it, and I wasn’t sure how to react, until I thought about the subsequent scene of their dinner together.
Owen brings Fran to an outdoor restaurant where, as he explains to her, you can choose whatever you want, and they’ll grill it in front of you. She says she wants chicken.
“They don’t have chicken,” Owen says.
“I want chicken,” Fran repeats.
They have beef and vegetables and fish; “they’ll make spaghetti if all else fails.”
“But I want chicken.”
You must choose what’s on the menu, Owen insists, and he means it not just about dinner, but about life.
“Brooklyn Laundry” is not precisely what I would have ordered from the playwright of “Doubt,” the exquisitely well-crafted drama, currently revived on Broadway, for which Shanley won a Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and the screenwriter of “Moonstruck,” that wacky romantic comedy, for which he won an Academy Award. But Shanley’s skill and charm are detectable in some delectable moments, even though as a whole this 75-minute one-act is not as fulfilling a story of a middle aged love against the odds as, say, Terrence McNally’s “Frankie and Johnny at the Clair de Lune”
And boy are there steep odds in “Brooklyn Laundry”: Owen owns the shop in Bushwick, and two others, because he was hit by a car, and successfully sued the driver, who had driven through a red light. Owen was in the hospital so long that he lost his office job, but he hated it anyway, and was able to get a second settlement, this time for wrongful termination. But the accident also caused a bad back, and killed his sex life, which is why his gloomy fiancé left him.
On hearing his story, Fran is envious: “Why doesn’t anything like that happen to me?”
“You want to get hit by a car?” Owen asks.
“At this point, it doesn’t sound so bad.”
She learns to eat her words, as her bad family situation gets worse, as we see in two separate scenes with her sisters, Trish (Florencia Lozano, bedridden but mentally quick on her feet) and Susie (Andrea Syglowski, spot-on as an older sibling, overtly commanding and secretly caring.) Each of them suffers so much – illness, bad men, bad luck – that their misfortune winds up radically changing Fran’s life.
If those scenes with the sisters feel imported from a different play, with their pile-on of trauma, the message of ‘Brooklyn Laundry” is ultimately optimistic enough, and the acting in the production funny or moving enough, that, as with the characters on stage, it feels worth living through what’s grim for what’s hopeful.
One of the sturdiest aspects of the production, which Shanley himself directed, is the design — especially Santo Loquasto’s four meticulously detailed sets — the interior of Trish’s trailer, the restaurant, Fran’s studio apartment, and above all, the laundry.
In a note in the program, Shanley tells us that he was inspired to write “Brooklyn Laundry” after his neighborhood cleaners lost a bag of his laundry. It’s a spoiler in two ways to tell you that he never recovered his bag, but that Fran does. A spoiler because it gives away one of the revelations in the play, but a minor one (there are doozies) — but also because it suggests that the reality that Shanley depicts on stage, for all the losses, is still more rewarding than his, and our, reality.
Brooklyn Laundry
MTC at MTC at New York City Center through April 14
Running time: 75 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $129
Written and directed by John Patrick Shanley
Scenic design by Santo Loquasto, costume design by Suzy Benzinger, lighting design by Brian MacDevitt, original music and sound design by John Gromada
Cast: David Zayas as Owen, Cecily Strong as Fran, Florencia Lozano as Trish, Andrea Syglowski as Suzie
Photographs by Jeremy Daniel.
