Lauren Annunziata (left) as Angie with Ty Molbak as the artist Blake, in Cary Gitter’s The Sabbath Girl.
Cary Gitter’s The Sabbath Girl, produced by the Penguin Rep and currently at 59e59, is an attempt at a throwback romantic comedy, a story of two lonely souls from different cultural worlds who find each other in the big city and forge ahead in the name of love despite all the obstacles.
Angie and Seth (Jeremy Rishe, right) share a kiss after lighting Sabbath candles.
Unfortunately, nothing about this play—not a single character or scene—feels truthful. The result is a mash-up of movie clichés, obvious laugh lines, and broad cultural stereotypes, anchored in dialogue in which characters don’t actually interact but rather describe themselves, their situations, and their personality traits.
Angie (Lauren Annunziata) is a 30-year-old single woman who grew up in a New Jersey Italian Catholic community but is living by herself on the Upper West Side and is the curator of an “edgy” Chelsea art gallery. Her one source of encouragement—and seemingly her only friend—is her grandmother, affectionately called Nonna, a salt-of-the-earth dispenser of whimsical wisdom.
Angie is wooing a hot young artist named Blake (Ty Molbak) to bring his work to her gallery. Blake’s character is a clichéd parody of a self-obsessed, shallow artist who has bought into his own hype. Every aspect of the play that touches on the art world, whether it’s artist, art, or gallery, feels false, even as would-be satire.
Blake briefly becomes a romantic interest for Angie (because she somehow can’t initially figure out that this ludicrous caricature is shallow and vain?). But the real romantic interest of the story is Angie’s neighbor down the hall, Seth (Jeremy Rishe), a friendly, insecure 32-year-old Orthodox Jew who needs a Shabbos goy to help him with tasks, such as turning on the air-conditioning, that he’s not allowed to do himself during the Sabbath. Seth owns and runs a Lower East Side knish shop with his sister Rachel (Lauren Singerman), whose function is to hector and criticize Seth for not being more in line with Orthodox culture.
The stage is populated with a series of cubes of various heights (scenic design by Christopher and Justin Swader) that are used differently in various settings; the change of scene is indicated by Yana Birÿkova’s rear projections—a menu when in the knish store, artwork for the gallery, and so forth. Joe Brancato’s direction moves the story along at a brisk pace, with the end of one scene sometimes overlapping with the beginning of a new one.
Angie confronts Seth’s sister Rachel (Lauren Singerman, right). Photographs by Carol Rosegg.
Despite very little meaningful conversation or time spent together, and no chemistry whatsoever, Seth and Angie fall for each other deeply, though the relationship seems largely based on the male fantasy that a woman Seth barely knows can save him and fill the void in his life. Angie is mostly a nonentity, a character created by combining “likes art” and “can’t find a nice guy.” Seth is deeply wounded—divorced after three hellish years of marriage, desperately lonely, and having a crisis of faith. After Angie and Seth’s first (and only) night together, the predictable confrontation between Angie and Rachel ensues, in which each makes unfair assumptions about the other and learn a moral lesson never to do that again, in the span of a couple of minutes.
A play like the one The Sabbath Girl is trying to be—light, funny, sweet, and unchallenging, in which the story will follow a well-worn path—has to be driven by wit and bear some resemblance to lived experience. But the only memorable moment of the evening was being instructed on the correct way to apply mustard to a knish.
The Sabbath Girl plays at 59e59 Theaters (59 East 59th St.) through March 8. Evening performances are at 7:15 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday; matinees are at 2:15 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and information, visit www.59e59.org.
