Preview Thoughts on queens and Amy and the Orphans

I've been fortunate to recently see two new plays by two much-talked about women playwrights!  Happily, it's becoming the tiniest bit easier to be able to see plays by women in big-name theaters.  I hope this trend increases exponentially over time and that artistic directors aren't thinking of women playwrights as a 'fad' that they can let drop away soon. Anyway, I thought both plays were terrifically done and I highly recommend you go see them.  Since they're both still in previews (oops, update, one opened already), I'll only offer a few thoughts...

Last season, one of my favorite plays was Martyna Majok's Cost of Living (remind yourself of my review HERE).  So I've been looking forward to seeing another of her plays and was excited when LCT3 announced they would produce her next work, queens.  This new piece takes place in the borough of Queens and deals with the lives of immigrant women who pass through there, mainly through one basement apartment.

So much of queens is incredibly powerful, with women making the hard choices and terrible sacrifices, seemingly for a better life for others, but also trying to make better lives for themselves.  Majok's characterizations and dialogue are first-rate, I could've heard conversations between these women go on all night.  They were all so true, so humane, and so fascinating to me.  It's always a breath of fresh air to see plays about working women, and working CLASS women, for whom just getting by is a struggle.  Majok gives them all the dignity they deserve and a voice that we need to hear.

photo credit: Erin Baiano

The bond these many women shared, and then fractured, was beautifully portrayed by all seven actresses, some of whom play more than one role.  And it seemed to me that all of their accents were spot on.  The play shifts in time, with 2001 the earliest time frame, and 2017 the most recent.  But as each era flits around, we see how memories shift and people change and how no person is any one thing.  It's quite ingenious the way the play has been put together.  I admit I wasn't fully on board for the penultimate scene, but I thought the rest of the play worked like absolute gangbusters.  It runs nearly three hours, with two intermissions, but as I said earlier, I could've listened to these women talk all night.  Oh, and along with being incredibly humane and moving?  queens is really funny throughout, with the humor that's automatically built into real life.  I really loved it.

The woman to the right of me, however, did not.  She left before the first intermission.  The woman to the left of me was more engrossed in her bag of M&Ms, but she stayed.  But the group of, uh, mature audience members behind me LOVED it.  Seriously loved it.  I didn't have the heart to turn around and ask them to observe the five-block rule, they loved it so much.  They just couldn't keep track of who was who, bless their hearts.  Each intermission was like a study session for a pop quiz, with them trying to figure out which actress was which character who was from which country.  (It's not that hard in the play, honest; these people were just not getting it.)  But it was nice to hear men and women of a certain age even older than mine really enjoying the play.  I highly recommend you go see it.

If you read my review of Majok's previous play, Cost of Living, or if you've read my blog before, you'll remember that I'm extremely interested in issues of disability.  When I read the NY Times article about the putting together of Roundabout's current Off-Broadway offering, Amy and the Orphans, I knew I wanted to see it.  Plus, friends of mine have waxed rhapsodically about the playwright, Lindsey Ferrentino for a long time.  I'm sad to have missed her Ugly Lies the Bone, so I didn't want to make the same mistake twice.

Amy and the Orphans deals with three siblings, two of whom are afraid to break the news about their father's death to their sister, who has Down syndrome.  Their sister, Amy, has lived in a group home her entire life and has never lived with the family.  Her two older siblings, played by the wonderful Mark Blum and Debra Monk, have vastly different memories of their childhood and their visits with Amy.  Amy, who is played by Jamie Brewer, has memories of her own.  Alternating with the scenes between the siblings are scenes with a couple at a couples retreat, undergoing a crisis in their marriage.  Exactly who they are, and how they fit into the story, is slowly revealed.

photo credit: Sara Krulwich

I thought the play was terrific, very funny and sad and real, with sibling squabbles, shorthand and miscommunication.  The acting was fantastic, all across the board, with a special shoutout to Jamie Brewer.  She also has Down syndrome, and she is simply spectacular.  She gives Amy such heart and humor, with a twinge of pain underneath.  Amy frequently quotes from movies (she has a job at a movie theater) and she has a monologue made up entirely of movie quotes that goes from hysterically funny to heartbreakingly sad in about an instant.  You can see a lifetime of being taken for granted in her performance, with no self-pity, and she is wonderful.  I was also taken with Vanessa Aspillaga, as Amy's no-nonsense caregiver.  And I always love Debra Monk and Mark Blum, they are just so effortlessly real, whoever they play.

Reading about the impulse for writing this play, I discovered the playwright had an aunt with Down syndrome, who recently passed away (HERE is that great NY Times article I mentioned above).  I thought Ferrentino captured the balance of trying to understand how her grandparents could abandon their disabled daughter, and how any decision affects the rest of the family.  How any decision in the abstract is the right decision, but how your reasons crumble away in the face of the realities.  How everyone's heart can be in the right place, but the right place isn't always RIGHT.  There was a lot of really terrific stuff in Amy and the Orphans and I highly recommend you go see it.  Not only because it's a good play, but because the lives of the disabled are so rarely on stage, and disabled performers are almost never telling their own stories, so this piece deserves all of its attention and we should stand behind it.