Theatre in Review: Dirty Laundry (WP Theater)

	Constance Shulman. Photo: Valerie Terranova

In Dirty Laundry, Constance Shulman plays the most practical adulteress you've ever met. Referred to in the script as Another Woman, she is, more accurately, The Other Woman, and she provides much more than the usual services. For example, she pops up at the home of her lover, a widower addled by grief; patiently surveying the blazer that he -- a neophyte in household matters -- has mistakenly put through the wash cycle, she decodes for him the symbols found on each piece of clothing, signaling "hand wash," "tumble dry," and "dry clean only." About the diamond sign, she says, dismissively, "Nobody knows," adding, with expert assurance, "It's a mystery."

Petite, whippet-thin, with hooded eyes that have seen it all and a flat Tennessee accent that reduces complex problems to rubble, Shulman makes this exercise in laundry instruction inexplicably hilarious. In another scene, preparing for what is likely her first romantic assignation in a long, long time, she stops off at a pharmacy to purchase a vaginal lubricant. This cues a meditation on such bizarre-sounding medical terms as "geriatric pregnancy," "irritable uterus," and "incompetent cervix." (She is, you should know, a nurse.) "Try telling a woman she has an incompetent cervix," she warns, in a tone that renders the words blissfully, riotously surreal.

So helpful is Another Woman, she even advises her lover on poems to be read at his wife's funeral. Delivering a solid rendition of W. H. Auden's "Funeral Blues," she adds, faintly dismissively, "It's from a movie. Four Weddings and a Funeral." But she follows up with Emily Dickinson's, "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," and a rendition of Harold Pinter's "It Is Here" so plangent that, as she concludes, a profound silence reigns. In her plainspoken, oddly detached way, she has given voice to the sorrow her companion cannot express.

I could have spent the entire evening listening to Another Woman dispense worldly wisdom. But Dirty Laundry is really about a thirtysomething New Yorker named Me and her father, otherwise known as My Dad. (The canny audience member will suspect that Mathilde Dratwa's play is just a wee bit autobiographical.) It focuses on what happens when My Dad's wife passes away and Me discovers that her father has, for several years, been unfaithful. This leads to a furious parent-child exchange, a toxic cocktail of grief and rage finished off with words that aren't easy to take back.

Much of Dirty Laundry focuses on the no-man's-land the characters find themselves in after such an explosive revelation. It's a solid setup, to be sure, but Dratwa has hardly bothered to dramatize it; instead, she has come down with a bad case of the Thornton Wilders, introducing a trio of narrators who do most of the talking. Indeed, there is no end to their helpfulness. Need some exposition? The chorus will step in. Is anyone afraid to express their feelings? The chorus can do it at length. They all but exhaust themselves, and us, working to ensure we don't miss a detail. The performers portraying them -- Mary Bacon, Sasha Diamond, and Amy Jo Jackson -- are always welcome presences but, in this case, they function like a gang of hijackers, forever stealing focus. When, at the funeral service, one chorus member relentlessly talks over Me's eulogy with multiple, muttered snarky comments, you may find yourself wishing that these busy magpies would shut up, just for a minute or two.

Lakisha May -- irritable and given to scorekeeping -- and Richard Masur -- tense and muted, defeated by the smallest task -- do their best to tease out drama from their characters' conflict but it's a tall order: Dirty Laundry wants us to feel the loss of a woman never seen and only sketchily described. My Dad's affair with Another Woman happens on a whim, and no explanation is given for its long duration; what they feel for each other is never explained. (The play mordantly notes that, for Another Woman, ending up with My Dad may be no prize; for her sins, she gets to drive him to his colonoscopy and buy toys for his grandson.) In the play's later passages, Dratwa takes a Wilder-style long view, indicating that the father-daughter breach loses its meaning as successive generations of the family come and go. By the finale, it's not clear what, if anything, we should feel about these people and their problems.

The director, Rebecca Martinez struggles to orchestra these proceedings, trying to balance the characters and chorus members, but it's not easy. She has also obtained a remarkably unattractive set from Raul Abrego, a kind of Busy Box that collages together empty frames, a stairway to nowhere, and a painting depicting a set of human kidneys. (My Dad is a nephrologist.) Cat Tate Starmer's lighting starts on a flat note but gets better as it goes along. Lux Haac's costumes and Tosin Olufolabi's minimal sound are reasonably well-done.

Possibly, Dratwa packed the script with so many distancing devices because the material is too close to her personal experience, or perhaps she was in an experimental mood. Whatever the reason, she has produced an unusually uninvolving play. But thanks be to Shulman, our infallible guide to navigating life's limited joys and small regrets; she makes Dirty Laundry watchable. --David Barbour