John Patrick Shanley’s new dramedy Brooklyn Laundry, now playing at Off Broadway’s Manhattan Theatre Club, may remind you of the pilot episode of a Showtime dramedy from the 1990s. The show centers on the oddball romance of two lonely middle-aged souls, who meet-cute at a drop-off laundry place, have a sparkly first date, and then set wildly unrealistic expectations for expectations for each other that they labor to explicate in a single late scene forced to carry the dramatic weight of an entire hotel’s dirty linens.
SNL alum Cecily Strong is endearingly prickly as Fran, a longtime singleton stuck in a dead-end office job, who strikes up an unexpectedly personal conversation with Owen, the owner of her neighborhood laundry who’s still smarting from a called-off engagement. David Zayas, a veteran of shows like Oz and Dexter, projects the perfect working-class regular-guy vibe for the role. After a somewhat awkward first encounter in the laundry, the two have a memorable date in an open-air restaurant where, fueled by psychedelic mushrooms, they gradually shed their inhibitions in a way that is delightfully and hilariously real and recalls Shanley’s most famous work, the Oscar-winning rom-com Moonstruck. Strong in particular shines here with the sudden, drug-induced fluidity of her hand gestures, an openness to the possibility of inviting something (and someone) new into her life.
This time, though, it’s all too easy to snap out of the glow of this budding romance. The fledgling couple’s scenes bookend Fran’s encounters with her two older sisters: Trish (Florencia Lozano, overly campy in an underwritten role) is a single mother of two getting hospice care in her dismal mobile home in rural Pennsylvania, rousing herself from pain-killer-induced haziness to dispense carpe-diem advice to old-maid Fran. Meanwhile, Susie (Andrea Syglowski, nailing a certain sharp-elbowed stridency) is facing her own personal family crises and needling Fran to step up in ways for which she is clearly not prepared.
All of this exposition leads to an improbable final scene between Fran and Owen, who have known each other for just weeks but who have somehow saddled each other with conflicting expectations that one could only reasonably expect of people who’ve known each other for years. Shanley, who also directs this promising but uneven production, asks too much of his characters here. But Strong and Zayas go a very long way to smoothing out the rough edges and smoothing the path toward a tentative reconciliation.