Review: Looking for Love and Dirty Clothes at the Brooklyn Laundry

Plays like Doubt notwithstanding, John Patrick Shanley has made a career in writing romantic dramas about losers looking for love. In Moonstruck, the characters are a widowed bookkeeper and a baker who lost a hand to a bread slicer. Danny and the Deep Blue Sea‘s protagonists are violent loners. Outside Mullingar (retitled Wild Mountain Thyme on film) is about a pair of middle-aged Irish farmers, one of whom thinks he’s a honeybee. In short, he can write a play like Brooklyn Laundry, now having its world premiere off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club, in his sleep — and for much of the 80-minute running time, it feels like he may have.

The wayward strangers at the center here are Owen (David Zayas) and Fran (Cecily Strong). Owen owns a string of drop-off laundromats throughout New York City, all purchased thanks to various legal settlements stemming from a car accident that left him in traction. Fran is one of the regular customers, and though they’d never met prior, Owen knows exactly who she is: the Brooklyn location lost a bag of her clothes and is still paying down the debt. Hot-tempered but desperate for companionship, Owen and Fran naturally hit it off and complications arise, as characters and situations are wont to do in rom coms.

Brooklyn Laundry isn’t afraid to wear its heart on its sleeve. The overwhelming charm of Owen and Fran (Zayas and Strong are endearing enough to instantly have us on their side) is balanced with tragedy: Fran’s older sister (the trucker-mouthed yet serene Florencia Lozano) is dying of a brain tumor, and their middle sister Susie (a frenetically nervous Andrea Syglowski) has a mortal secret of her own. Shanley, in his 13^th Manhattan Theatre Club production, knows exactly how to get the subscribers tsking and tutting, and there are moments in this play, mostly related to the wrenching performances of Syglowski and Lozano, which seem specifically built to get an audible reaction from a studio audience.

The Owen-Fran scenes, which make up the bulk of the play, are thoroughly charming and tinged with melancholy, a May-December romance (Strong, in real life, is 20 years younger than Zayas, though the script only calls for about a decade of difference between them) for two of society’s leftovers. They have a great scene together where they succumb to the power of magic mushrooms while on a date at a fancy restaurant, the ensuing conversation vacillating between philosophical musings on life and their desire to eat chicken, which isn’t on the menu. It’ll definitely be used in acting classes, a sweet, nonthreatening companion to the violence of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea.

Shanley’s staging is swift and beautifully rendered. Santo Loquasto has designed a quartet of jaw-droppingly lifelike sets, including the eponymous laundromat, which looks like it could really open for business tomorrow. It sounds like it, too, thanks to the mechanical clinging and clanging provided by composer John Gromada.

Does all that a satisfying evening make? Not quite. Brooklyn Laundry is short enough to get you out in time for dinner, and I’m thankful for at least one playwright who’s still willing to create an unabashed romance for our cynical world. But there’s something about it that’s completely lacking in consequence. The lights come up, you say, “Oh, that was nice,” and then you go about your life, the production reduced to a program you stumble upon in a pile of dirty clothes a week later. I can’t say I regretted sitting there, but I doubt this play will have the same impact as some of his others.