“Once
In Love with . . .”
Just because a subject is serious doesn’t mean it
can’t be funny. Or such would seem to have been the case with Lindsey
Ferrentino’s thinking when she wrote Amy
and the Orphans, now at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre. On the other hand,
just because you want your play to be funny doesn’t mean it will be. Which is
only one of several problems with Amy and
the Orphans.
Ferrentino (Ugly
Lies the Bone), a rising young writer whose This Flat Earth is next up on the Playwrights Horizons schedule,
has chosen a topic close to her personal life. It’s the story of a woman born
with Down Syndrome in the days when, as the playwright notes was the case with
her own Aunt Amy (1964-2014), children with the condition were called things like
“Mongolian idiots.” I remember well the common use of the first word.
Many, rather than being raised and cared for by their
parents, were packed off to mental institutions. If they were lucky, like the
Amy in Ferrentino’s play, one or both of their parents occasionally visited;
other family members were likely to have neglected them, or so Ferrentino
suggests, based on her own aunt’s experiences.
I can’t say how widespread this attitude was or when
it changed; happily, in every case I know of personally when a family had a
child with a disability, that child was given so much love and parental care it
would have made non-disabled kids jealous. 
Amy
and the Orphans dramatizes this dilemma by uncomfortably
splitting the narrative into two alternating threads, one in the past (presumably in the
60s), after Amy’s birth, focusing on her parents, Sarah (Diane Davis) and Bobby
(Josh McDermott), the other in the present, just after Bobby’s death.
In the first, an extended flashback, Sarah and Bobby
are at some sort of retreat dealing with her depression in the wake of a
decision that only becomes clear as the action progresses. In the second, Amy’s
siblings, Jacob (Mark Blum) and Maggie (Debra Monk), have flown to New York, he
from California and she from Chicago, to inform the now middle-aged Amy (Jamie
Brewer) of their father’s death.
Amy is living under state care at a Queens residence,
where her dedicated and capable caretaker is Kathy (Vanessa Aspillaga), a
pregnant Long Islander. Jacob and Maggie must drive a rental car to the
facility and get Amy so she can accompany them to Montauk, at the far end of
Long Island, for their father’s funeral. Kathy, who is required to accompany
her charge, will drive.
Ferrentino pads out the plot by a variety of desperate
comic strategies, like reducing Sarah and Bobby’s problem—which we must wait to
figure out—to sexual game playing. When Sarah engages Bobby in an exercise
where they must go back and forth relating the facts of their lives, “until we
believe them,” he responds, “I have an erection.” In fact, the overweight Bobby
plays all these scenes with his shirt off. There are some moments you might
consider touching (both emotionally and physically) but, mostly, the marital exchanges
seek laughs from Bobby’s horniness. 
The main thread, set decades later, focuses on the
relationship of Jacob and Maggie to the institutionalized sister they largely
ignored until now. Jacob and Maggie, however, are written and played as farcically
obnoxious New York Jews. Despite their good intentions—underlined by Jacob’s
patronizingly annoying attempts to explain Bobby’s death to Amy—they lack the
crediblity required for us to see them as flawed humans confronting their
guilt. As written and played,
their sister comes off as the wisest of the three.
Blum and Monk, among New York’s most respected
performers, have not been served well by the script or director Scott Ellis’s
thumb on the comedy scale.
Woeful jokes are mined from the sixtiesh Jacob’s
wearing of braces and his conversion from Judaism to Born Again Christianity.
Maggie, for her part, is a shrill, pushy know-nothing who shouts at her brother
every time he mentions Christmas instead of Hanukkah. Then there are the Long
Island Expressway jokes, the carsick business, Amy’s boyfriend’s movie star
name, etc.
There’s also a big emotional reveal that’s intended to
crush the comic shenanigans with a shocker about Amy’s past. While it’s feasible
that something like it could have happened, it comes off here more as
melodramatic plot boiling than authentic experience.
Just as New Jersey has replaced Brooklyn as the knee-jerk
locale de résistance, Ferrentino uses Long Island for cheap yocks (I saw
someone actually applaud at its mention). The loud, potty-mouthed Kathy,
described in the script as “the walking embodiment of Long Island,” is played
by the talented Aspillaga with the most irritatingly overdone Italian-American
Long Island accent you never want to hear. She’d be more convincing if she
dialed it down a bit; also, like so many actors in our increasingly nonsmoking
culture, Aspillaga should learn how to hold an unlit cigarette the way a real
smoker would.
The only thing worthwhile in this uncomfortable
enterprise is the presence of Jamie Brewer, someone who actually has Down
Syndrome, as Amy, albeit on a relatively high-functioning level. This is a
breakthrough for performers with Down Syndrome. 
Each week, at designated performances, Edward
Barbanell, another Down Syndrome actor, takes over, with Amy changed to Andy. The
33-year-old Brewer, despite her wig, looks too young for her role, but she
carries it off with spunk and bravado, giving the production its most endearing
and human performance.
Rachel Hauck’s set, apart from the paneled room used
for Bobby and Sarah’s exercises, combines movable, neutral, Lucite-like walls with sliding scenic units to help morph from one place to another. Kenneth Posner’s lighting is of considerable assistance in altering the visual moods. Alejo Vietti’s present-day costumes look fine but, Sarah’s bell-bottoms aside, little else about the flashback scenes clearly
defines the period.
One of Amy’s characteristics is a love of movies, her
dad having taken her to many when he visited, so she’s memorized loads of
classic lines. In one of the play’s more inventive moments, she ends the play
in front of a red velour curtain, rattling off a string of them. I'd like to offer Ms. Brewer one she doesn’t
mention: “Here’s looking at you, kid.”
OTHER
VIEWPOINTS:
Laura
Pels Theatre
111
W. 46th St., NYC
Through April 22
