Despite Funny and Moving Moments, Mathilde Dratwa’s ‘Dirty Laundry’ Proves To Be Something of a Slog

Disney Pixar’s popular “Inside Out” films use animated creatures to represent a girl’s conflicting emotions, with a specific color designated to each one. Yellow, blue, red, and green respectively indicate joy, sadness, anger, and disgust. In the world premiere stage production of Mathilde Dratwa’s “Dirty Laundry,” previously available as an audio play, three women who help take us inside the head of a central character, and emerge as others, are identified in the program as Blue, Red, and Green. I don’t know if Ms. Dratwa, who has a young child, was at all inspired by the movies, but there is little Yellow, i.e., joy, in “Laundry.” Drawn from the playwright’s personal experience, the play follows another young mother living in New York, listed in the script as Me — the character is also a writer, and an educator; she mentions working at the New Victory Theater, where Ms. Dratwa has been a teaching artist — as she contends with a double whammy: the death of her mother, following a brief bout with cancer, and the revelation of her father’s years-long infidelity.Blue, Red, and Green appear before any of this is disclosed. The text refers to them simply as the “Chorus,” suggesting the Greek tradition, making no mention of individual character names but displaying their lines in corresponding colors, sometimes layering the shades. (Lux Haac’s casual costume design doesn’t offer help the way Disney’s did.) “Sometimes they speak chorally,” readers are informed, but “mostly they do not.”Certainly, the actors playing these roles convey different personality types. Mary Bacon’s Blue comes closest to a reliable narrator; still holding her script at a recent preview, Ms. Bacon resembled a schoolteacher — a job Me’s mother held — by turns lecturing and reassuring her students. Amy Jo Jackson’s Green is more tart, sporting lavender hair and throwing knowing glances at the audience, while Sasha Diamond’s Red comes across as youthful, excitable, and occasionally self-righteous.The same could be said of Ms. Dratwa’s writing, as well as Rebecca Martínez’s sometimes overzealous direction. The choral actors stomp about Raul Abrego’s minimal set, sometimes providing sound effects (when a phone call comes in, they shout, “Ring! Ring!”); trying to wax clever in their comments and insights, they can just seem snarky, or banal. At one point, trying to voice the frustration inside the protagonist’s head, one laments, “Can’t you just tell me what to feel?! Isn’t that what society is FOR?!” Lakisha May in ‘Dirty Laundry.’ Valerie TerranovaLakisha May, who proved a comedic dynamo juggling three roles in last year’s Broadway production of “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” fares little better as Me, whose moods shift between sad and irritated. You can hardly blame her, given the two-fisted punch life has just dealt her; still, it’s a shame that the audience has to wait until late in the play to get a glimpse at Ms. May’s true luminosity.Unfortunately, Ms. May is nearly upstaged in this scene — in which her character delivers a eulogy for her mother — by Ms. Diamond’s Red, who in a bid to illustrate the subtext and clashing emotions behind the words acts like a child throwing a temper tantrum.“Laundry” nonetheless has its funny and moving moments, many of them involving a pair of beloved older actors: Richard Masur, who is cast as the straying father, and Constance Shulman, who plays his mistress, initially introduced as “Another Woman” but eventually referred to by her name, Sherry. This shift is telling, as Ms. Dratwa’s play is redeemed more than anything else by a forgiving spirit that ultimately mitigates both the too-cute judgment of the chorus and the misery of other characters.Ms. Shulman in particular is a bright light, and she gets ample opportunity to showcase her signature wry wit and unforced empathy, whether Sherry is teaching her recently widowed partner in sin how to use a washing machine or helping him choose a literary passage for his wife’s funeral. Sherry may be the least cultured character in the play, but Ms. Dratwa gives her a practical wisdom and a sense of decency that never seem condescending.Had “Dirty Laundry” delivered a little more of this generosity and buoyancy, it might have been a bit less of a chore to get through it.

Despite Funny and Moving Moments, Mathilde Dratwa’s ‘Dirty Laundry’ Proves To Be Something of a Slog

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