Review - Our Lady of 121st Street

Well, life has seriously gotten in the way of everything lately.  My tablet died, which means I can only blog from my office, and two of the shows I was supposed to see last week got postponed.  I guess it's a good thing, except then there was the long holiday weekend in-between, so now I have to make my brain work harder to remember things.  This could be a challenge; I have a feeling this will be a short post, so please bear with me...

You all, I am absolutely sure, remember that I love the Signature Theatre.  I love their mission, I love their productions.  I saw, and loved, last season's production of Stephen Adly Guirgis' Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train (remind yourself of my review HERE) and I also enjoyed his Pulitzer Prize-winning Between Riverside and Crazy (review is HERE).  I just find him to be a powerful writer, with an amazing facility for dialogue and characterizations.  I don't know the people he writes about and I love getting to know them over the course of his plays.  When Signature announced the second show in Guirgis' residency, a revival of his 2003 play Our Lady of 121st Street, I pounced.  Of course I pounced.

photo credit: Sara Krulwich

Our Lady of 121st Street starts with a bang - we're in a funeral parlor and we discover that the body that was supposed to be in the casket has been stolen.  Our attention is grabbed immediately, by that fact, and by the fact that the character who is the most upset by this is also lacking pants.  Who would steal a body AND a pair of pants?  It's an intriguing and pretty hilarious opening.  The twists and turns and people we meet along the way are just grand as well.

I spent two very happy hours in the company of the amazing cast.  The play is actually less about the plot (or the resolution to the mystery of the missing corpse and pants) and more about the people and the connection each person has to the others.  And the right, and wrong, ways that humans respond to adversity.  Lovely stuff.  It's truly amazing to me how quickly I can get to know and love each of the characters Guirgis writes about - the world-weary detective hiding tragic secrets, to the spitfire/spurned ex-wife, to the brothers who are connected in maybe too many ways, to the random woman with seemingly no connection to everyone else.  But, really, each and every character is expertly drawn and expertly acted.  They all made me laugh and they certainly all made me cry.

Standouts for me, though, were the scenes in the confessional, between the maybe-over-it-all priest and the ne'er do well who is trying to cram 30 years of confessions into one afternoon.  These scenes were hysterically funny, but also so real and true, they hurt.  SO well done.  Though, I do have to admit, I was bothered by one thing: the priest is disabled, in a wheelchair after losing his legs.  The actor, however, was not disabled - how do I know that?  Because he came out for curtain call, standing proud.  You all know how this frustrates me.  This is not a criticism of the actor, he was lovely, but I have to say I was again disappointed by the choice to not cast a disabled actor.  How can we turn the tide on this?  I wish I knew.

Our Lady of 121st Street has been extended a couple of times and I highly recommend you go see it.  Stephen Adly Guirgis is one of our most accomplished writers and I absolutely cannot wait to see what he brings us next.  And Signature has assembled a crackerjack group of actors who do justice to this wonderful writing - thumbs way up from me.