Despite their infirmities, Man (Dan Lauria) and Woman (Patty McCormack) enjoy a lively give-and-take in Lauria’s Just Another Day.
It’s I’m Not Rappaport meets Waiting for Godot meets The Gin Game! Take two old codgers on a park bench, combine with existential meanderings in a fixed setting, season with the ravages of aging, and you have Just Another Day, Dan Lauria’s uncertain reflection on all three components (but especially the third). Just Another Day suffers from being too much—well, just another day. Nothing terribly dramatic happens, and a great deal of curiously multisyllabic palaver fills out the hour and 45 minutes, including intermission. But it does have two actors very much worth seeing, for Lauria has cast himself, and opposite him, a flawless Patty McCormack.
The latter stole an Off-Broadway revival of Morning’s at Seven a couple of seasons back (which also starred Lauria), and she steals this, though Lauria is more than up to the task of playing what he wrote. What he wrote, unfortunately, takes a while to figure out. On a set of bench, Astroturf, lamppost, and rock (no set designer is billed), Man (the characters lack names) sits contentedly. Enter Woman, described in the script, quite accurately, as “a woman in her 70s, well dressed and still very attractive.”
Woman—afflicted, perhaps, but still verbally eloquent.
She wishes to sit, and it appears they don’t know each other: Her first words are “May I?”, and his response, “Free country.” But immediately they’re jabbering and sparring like old cronies. She’s clearly the cleverer of the two: Asked if she’s religious, she replies, “Oh, I now have too much faith in God to believe in religion.” And her vocabulary is a dazzlement: “This blatant, misguided braggadocio of yours is just gutter depravity. Your mind is obviously at the noisome depth of a sewage system.”
What’s going on? It may take most of the first act to suss out, but eventually it becomes clearer: Both are in an assisted-living facility, and both suffer from—there is no precise diagnosis—Alzheimer’s or dementia. They know each other, maybe intimately, maybe even maritally, but Lauria’s script likes ambiguity about such matters. They change moods on a dime, and when they get flirtatious or handsy, an offstage bell admonishes them to stop. An actual judgmental employee (and why would they be?) or the pair’s internal censors going off? Again, ambiguity.
What’s clear is, whatever their mental challenges, the two love and retain a vast knowledge of 1940s movies; surely no other play in town mentions Bruce Bennett and Alfonso Bedoya. And slowly, quite slowly, we learn more about them. Apparently she was a TV comedy writer and perhaps poet; he also wrote poetry and painted—paintings or walls, he’s not sure. But so much of Lauria’s dialogue feels written, overwritten. The jokes often don’t land: “I’m beginning to wonder if your mother had any children that lived.” They do pay off in the second act, when the two re-create, delightfully, a TV sketch she wrote (but how would both remember it?). But then there are lines like “I refuse to be subjected to such importunate sophistry.” Who talks like that?
A moment of skepticism on Woman’s part. Photographs by Russ Rowland.
If you recall McCormack in The Bad Seed with the same pleasure and affection that Man and Woman have for James Stewart and Donna Reed in It’s a Wonderful Life, you’ll leap at the chance to see her demonstrating her actorly excellence nearly 70 years later. And Lauria supplies, if not natural-sounding dialogue or a plot that goes anywhere, a simpatico counterpoint to her virtuosity. They might play even better together if Eric Krebs’s direction weren’t stuck on one speed, relentless, or offered more action; admittedly, in a two-character play set largely on a park bench, that isn’t easy.
Lauria says in his script introduction that Just Another Day is “meant to bring awareness of the growing epidemic of dementia and Alzheimer’s,” and he suggests it could be played with script in hand, like The Guys or Love Letters. Nice thought, but Just Another Day covers less ground than those, and presents these afflictions confusingly: When are dementia and/or Alzheimer’s accompanied by such hyperliteracy, and so many one-liners? Lauria has given us much enjoyment over the years, in The Wonder Years and dozens of TV shows, and on stage in A Christmas Story and Lombardi. So far, as a playwright, he’s a pretty good actor.
Just Another Day plays at Theater 555 (555 West 42nd St.) through June 30. Evening performances are 7 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. Matinees are Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. For more information, visit www.theater555.venuetix.com.
Playwright: Dan Lauria
Director: Eric Krebs
Lighting: Joan Racho-Jansen
Costumes: Bettina Bierly
Sound: Andy Evan Cohen
