Review - Washer/Dryer

Each show I've seen produced by the Ma-Yi Theater Company has been a worthy one - I've learned a little something about different cultures, different lives, different worlds.  When I got an e-mail about their new play, Washer/Dryer, by Nandita Shenoy (who also stars), I imagined I would learn something new again.  I don't know that I did, at least not in the way I was expecting, but that doesn't mean I didn't have a good time.  *Review caveat:  this has been a really long week and I'm extremely tired, so this may be a goofy review.  Sorry in advance.  I did want to write something, though, to get word about the show into the ether...

Washer/Dryer is about a newly-married couple trying to figure out their future lives together.  They've only been married three days and Michael has moved into his new wife's studio apartment, which Sonya purchased a few years ago.  The couple is still in the honeymoon phase, but when Michael asks Sonya why he still has to ask the doorman to buzz him upstairs, the wacky hijinks ensue.  It turns out Sonya's lease stipulates that her apartment is 'single occupancy only.'  Which means no one can live with her.  What that means, and how all of the characters in the show react to it, is what starts the comedy.  Does Sonya love her apartment more than she loves Michael?  Does Michael really know the girl he married?

photo credit: Isaiah Tanenbaum

We also meet Michael's mother, a very possessive psychiatrist; Wendee, the power-hungry co-op board president; and Sam, Sonya's downstairs neighbor.  There are misunderstandings, mistaken identities, some fun physical humor bits and laugh-out loud lines.  Shenoy has a light touch with dialogue and one-liners.  A lot of them were funny, but also illuminating about the characters or the situation.  Some of them were funny just to be funny, but that didn't happen too much of the time.  But I did think that occasionally the actors, who were mainly quite good, pushed the 'funny' too much when they should've been mining the humor in the situation, but as the play progressed, that bothered me less.

The play doesn't really delve all that much into the cultural and ethnic differences in the lead characters - at first, I was a little disappointed that there wasn't a deeper exploration of the inherent problems in a marriage between two cultures, but then I started to appreciate that this was a funny, real story of people, and ethnicity need not matter.  It does, of course, because that's who they are, and where they came from, but that wasn't what drove them.  Of course, as I read my review, I don't mention culture or ethnicity either.  Is that a good thing?  Is that coming from my white privilege?  I don't know.  I do know that I think it's nice to see a female writer of color getting an Off-Broadway production, featuring a talented multiethnic cast, that's for sure.

Maybe it's because I'm now a New Yorker, but I found all of the real estate problems in the play really funny, especially the idea of an apartment with a washer and dryer as being the holy grail.  I mean, I would be hard pressed to give up that apartment, too!  Some of the reviews mentioned that the central conflict, a lease with a 'single occupancy' clause, is unrealistic.  Well, I'm here to tell you that there were unknown clauses in my apartment's lease, too, so I didn't find it unrealistic at all.  I live in a co-op building myself (not as an owner, but as a renter) and I've seen the co-op board politics first hand.  I can only imagine how much more cutthroat they are on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.  But Washer/Dryer is not just a silly comedy, though there is quite a bit of silliness throughout the evening.  The play asked some really interesting questions, at least for me, about self-identifying, self-awareness, compromise and expanding pre-existing notions.   As someone who has tagged herself a 'single gal,' I enjoyed watching a smart, interesting woman onstage try to work that out for herself.  Overall, there was a sweetness to the proceedings that I enjoyed and I think a breezy comedy is just the thing every now and then.