Theatre in Review: Brooklyn Laundry (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage I)

	David Zayas. Photo: Jeremy Daniel

In Brooklyn Laundry, John Patrick Shanley preaches the necessity of casting aside one's starry-eyed illusions and embracing the true satisfaction of love in the real world; to argue this proposition, he gins up the most obviously manufactured plot of the season. Throwing together a couple of cranky, oddball New Yorkers and sending them stumbling in the direction of romance, he then subjects them to a borderline sadistic series of stress tests. Can this love affair be saved? Can the playwright stop torturing his characters?

Fran is one of those perpetually on-the-defensive city dwellers, who, as played by Cecily Strong faces the world with permanently rolled eyes and a what-can-you-do shrug. She's fed up with her ex-boyfriend, she has little use for her boring job, and she's not too happy about patronizing the establishment that previously lost $150 worth of her clothing. (Replacing the missing items cost her much, much more, she grumbles.) Whatever you do, don't call her gloomy, however; it will only set her off. Owen is a small-time entrepreneur, the owner of three laundries scattered around the city; a former office worker, he took the insurance money from an auto accident and set himself up in business. "Why doesn't anything like that happen to me?" wonders Fran, glumly. "You want to get hit by a car?" Owen asks. "At this point, it doesn't sound so bad," she replies.

In Shanley 's dramatic universe, this is known as striking romantic sparks, so off they go on a dinner date, to which Fran shows up, for the first time in her life, high on mushrooms. (In the eighties, characters in plays naively smoked pot for comic effect; in the fifties and sixties, they went overboard with martinis; such is progress in the theatre.) Owen joins her and, as they zone out, complaining about the lack of chicken on the menu, you might wonder why, after two full scenes, you can't think of a reason why these lonely hearts belong together. But, making his pitch, Owen says to his persnickety, self-defeating companion, "You must choose from what exists on the menu, Fran, and not choose the invisible thing in your mind."

Putting this proposition to the test. Shanley dishes up a smorgasbord of traumas, including two cancer cases, sexual dysfunction, a passel of orphans, a cohort of useless men, financial ruin, and a surprise pregnancy. It's a flagrant case of overkill, reducing Fran, already an ill-defined character, to little more than a punching bag. The play asks the question: Can Frank and Owen's love survive all this? The real question is: Will Fran make it through the day without having a complete nervous breakdown?

Interwoven into this romantic standoff are scenes involving Fran's disaster-prone family, ravaged by illness, bad marriages, and money troubles. The play's peculiar structure alternates sitcom-style sparring with darker musings on love and death. ("Life is ridiculous," says Fran's ailing sister, Trish. "You can't talk about it because you always get it wrong.") The opposing tones jostle up against each other, uneasily. Brooklyn Laundry wants to be both a wisecracking comedy and a meditation on the fleeting nature of happiness, a romance conducted in the shadow of disaster. It's a tall order and the play often moves in mutually exclusive directions.

Shanley, who also directed, at least has an eye for casting. David Zayas' Owen proudly displays his poker face even when confronting the parade of rolling calamities afflicting Fran; he convincingly creates a character who has been through the mill and wants to seize on any pleasures life can offer. Fran isn't especially easy to like, especially when refusing to attend the deathbed of a beloved sibling for fear it will interfere with her new relationship -- "She'll be dead, and I'll be stuck here alive with no one if I don't...give life a chance," she reasons, muddily -- but, thanks to Strong, she has her moments, whether striking occult poses to show how she allegedly "manifests" unwelcome developments or, cruising on those psychedelics, staring at Zayas through a glass of water. The play is almost entirely stolen by Florencia Lozano as Trish, whose life is winding down in a Pennsylvania trailer park; she gets the play's juiciest speeches and Lozano makes the most of them. Andrea Syglowski, seen to good advantage earlier this season in Theresa Rebeck's Dig, makes a strong impression as Susie, another sister, who acts as the play's superego, handing Fran a to-do list that is enough to cripple anyone's spirit.

It's not every 75-minute play that requires four fully dressed sets, so scenic designer Santo Loquasto's turntable is regularly on the move, delivering the laundry of the title, the interior of Trish's trailer, an outdoor restaurant, and Fran's studio apartment, all of them vividly realized and lit with subtle, telling details by Brian MacDevitt. Suzy Benzinger's costumes feel true to the characters. John Gromada provides original music, sound effects (including thrumming washing machines and restaurant chatter), and a few mildly eccentric music choices, including Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road."

Brookyn Laundry may attract audiences with fond memories of Shanley's screenplay for Moonstruck but its humor is often half-hearted, and its serious passages feel borrowed from the playwright's better works. Fran and Owen are merely a pair of attitudes, not flesh-and-blood people in deep need of healing, and their coming together feels thoroughly contrived. Frankly, their prognosis is shaky: I give them six months. --David Barbour