Patty (Rhea Perlman) tries in vain to reach her daughter Cecile in Zarina Shea’s Let’s Call Her Patty..
For older females, upper middle-class life, even when coated with a veneer of happiness, creature comforts, and respectability, is not always all it’s cracked up to be. Playwright Zarina Shea’s Let’s Call Her Patty focuses on this milieu via an Upper West Side woman, flanked by her daughter and niece. Margot Bordelon’s direction reflects first the comic, then the tragic aspects of such a life.
Patty (Rhea Perlman) is like many empty nesters who fill their days with spa and gym visits, gossiping with friends, dining with husbands and others, and pampering their pets. She’s nearly always center stage, perpetually talking, and mechanically chopping vegetables for her gourmet-indulged cat. She’s also, apparently culturally but not religiously, Jewish.
Even though Patty and her husband, Hal, whom the audience never meets, live in a high-end, largely yuppified area near Central Park, they long for a dream co-op. Patty shops for food at boutique establishments, takes expensive vacations, and, as a stereotypically Jewish mother, tries to make her daughter’s life work when it doesn't.
Cecile (Arielle Goldman) struggles with self-doubt and addiction. Photographs by Jeremy Daniel.
Areille Goldman as her daughter Cecile (Arielle Goldman), a sculptor, is convincing as a lost soul, a niece whom Patty and Hal adopted when her mother, Patty’s sister, died. She is considerably younger than their own child Sammy (Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer). Breaking the fourth wall, Sammy often explains Patty to the audience, finishes Patty’s sentences, and corrects her, in a symbiotic banter:
Patty: My makeup’s gonna run. Where’d you get that shirt?
Sammy: You gave me this shirt.
Patty: I did?
Sammy [looking to the audience]: She grew up in Brooklyn.
Patty: Where I basically raised you.
Sammy: Kind of true.
Kritzer’s Sammy is a powerful buffer between Patty’s “together” and “less together” halves, and between Patty and Cecile, who, in her apartment, also addresses the audience, with a melancholic tone and demeanor. Sammy may have her own issues, but she is happily married to another woman, is more settled than Cecile, and more serene overall than Patty.
Patty stacks Cecile’s refrigerator with food and longs to share in her daughter’s artistic accolades. Evasive and self-destructive, Cecile frustrates her mother; she walks out on her sculpture exhibition in Germany and keeps her whereabouts secret. Patty’s “helpful” rent payments enable Cecile’s deep dive into hard drugs rather than an upward career trajectory. It’s only because of Sammy’s gentle but firm insistence that Patty comes to realize that her late mother’s jewels may have been stolen by Cecile and used to purchase drugs.
Scratch the surface of Patty’s many quips, and she is funny. She has a set of laws, her “mosaics.” Among them: “A woman over 50 should not wear short shorts—no matter how good her legs are” and “Never pick an orifice in public.”
Goldman’s Cecile (left) listens as Sammy (Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer) gives her some unwanted advice.
Patty is also frantic—and eventually her desperation becomes apparent. What has been repressed subtly develops as she interrogates Sammy about her visits with Cecile. One wishes Perlman’s “pot” as Patty would simmer less slowly, and that there were more regularly perceptible changes, but by the play’s end, Patty collapses on the floor in tears.
Bordon has, by means of Patty’s repetitive, nearly obsessive chopping, underscored an anger that belies the contented-matron persona. Oliver Wason’s brief on-again, off-again bursts of lighting signify activities that start and end. The light flashes underscore the patterns, sequences, and routines in Patty’s life, one of which is the way she embroils herself in Cecile’s life. The more she does, the more Cecile’s resentment increases, which leaves Patty in greater agony.
When Patty curls up downstage in a ball, it’s an open question whether she can transcend her guilt to truly help Cecile. With the sudden rush of contrition-ridden tears, Patty finally acknowledges her own reality.
Clearly, Sammy is the real catalyst for Patty’s changes from within, especially when she tells Patty that she can’t fix Cecile’s life, and that Cecile must choose how she lives, even if she chooses poorly. Shea’s point—that adult children must make and live with their own choices—has universal relevance.
Although each of the three women is strong in her own way, neither mother nor daughter is objective enough to recognize her limitations by herself. For all its comic moments, Let’s Call Her Patty is a powerful drama about three women bound by deep love who nevertheless need “space” to carve out individual identities at different points in their life cycles.
Let’s Call Her Patty runs through Aug. 27 at the Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center (150 W. 65th St. Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Wednesday through Monday at 7 p.m.; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For more information, email contact the box office at (212) 501-3100 or info@lct.org.
Playwright: Zarina Shea
Director: Margot Bordelon
Sets: Kristen Robinson
Costumes: Sarafina Bush
Lighting: Oliver Wason
Sound: Sinan Refik Zafar
