‘AMY AND THE ORPHANS’ IS A THEATRICAL FIRST

Vanessa Aspillaga, Jamie Brewer, Debra Monk and Mark Blum (photo by Joan Marcus)

HENRY EDWARDS - NEW YORK - March 9, 2018

Until Lisa Ferrentino’s family comedy-drama, “Amy and the Orphans,” arrived at Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre, there’s never been an Off Broadway or Broadway production to cast an actor with Down syndrome in a lead role.

Groundbreaker Jamie Brewer, 33, has been performing since the eighth grade and is best known as Adelaide 'Addie' Langdon on FX’s “American Horror Story.”

The actress portrays the Amy of “Amy and the Orphans.” Amy has Down syndrome, lives in a group home in Queens, has a boyfriend, loves movies, manages a movie theatre and punctuates her conversation with quotations from her favorite films (“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”).
Before I go any further, let it be said that Brewer is superb and her performance is one of most entrancing in quite some time.

Theatergoers know playwright Ferrentino from her 2015 debut, “Ugly Lies the Bone.” The agonizing portrait of a badly disfigured American veteran of the war in Afghanistan scored a critical and commercial success for Roundabout Theatre Company, encouraging the organization to commission the play that became “Amy and the Orphans.”

Ferrentino bases the character of on her deceased aunt, Amy Jacobs, who was born with Down syndrome in 1964.It was a time when children with the condition were called Mongolian idiots and hidden from view. Ferrentino’s grandparents were advised not to take the baby home, did as they were told, and Jacobs spent most of her life in state-funded institutions where she never learned to read.  Ferrentino’s script includes the instruction: "Finding a talented actor with Down syndrome isn't difficult, so please do it.”

Eight-time Tony nominee Scott Ellis (“The Elephant Man”; “She Loves Me”) directs the production and the intentions of everyone involved are so worthy it would be a pleasure to report that the result is wonderful.

Unfortunately, “Amy and the Orphans” turns out to be a mixed blessing.
Fearful perhaps of the subject, the play goes out of its way to be too audience friendly with Ferrentino dishing up doses of hoary comedy (some of it really funny in spite of itself) that suggests very early Neil Simon. Josh McDermitt and Jamie Brewer (photo by Joan Marcus)

“Amy and the Orphans” takes place in two time zones, the 1960s and the present and the Sixties come first.
Sarah (Diane Davis) and Bobby (Josh McDermitt from “The Walking Dead”) are married and in their mid-thirties, and have checked into a couples-therapy retreat.  They are caught up performing a silly New Age exercise about trust and personal truths that inevitably turns into a not-all-that serious squabble.

Fast-forwarding to the present day, we next meet Amy’s two older siblings, the “orphans” of the title, Jacob (Mark Blum) and Maggie (Debra Monk).
They have flown to New York, he from California (it was the farthest he could escape from his Long Island roots) and she from Chicago, to visit Amy at the state residence in Queens, NY, where she lives, inform her of their father’s death and transport her to Montauk, at the far end of Long Island, for their father’s funeral.

Jacob and Mary, who are both in their sixties, are so exaggerated, loud and aggressively neurotic, they seem to have escaped from a Borscht Belt that doesn’t exist anymore.
Jacob, a classic kvetch, maintains a strict organic diet (he juices six times a day), is a practicing Born Again Christian, and recently had braces placed on his teeth (“because of a serious jaw misalignment").  

It’s no surprise that he paid tribute to Jesus during their mother’s Jewish funeral service (which neither sibling bothered to tell Amy about).
Maggie, a real estate agent from Chicago, is a shrill, pushy, full time mess. She comes equipped with a theme song that she bellows repeatedly and goes like this: “Isn’t there a grown-up who can take care of this for us? We’re orphans now!”

Amy’s devoted, capable, pregnant, foul mouthed and very loud caretaker Kathy (Vanessa Aspillaga) is mandated by regulations to accompany Amy, a ward of the state, on the road trip down the Long Island Expressway to the funeral. The pushy “walking embodiment of Long Island” insists on driving.
Road trips are nothing new — think of the riotous, dysfunctional, car-bound family journey in “Little Miss Sunshine.”   But this particular version is studded with clichés: carsickness (Maggie), whining (Jacob), and disapproval (Kathy).

What proves of interest is the interaction between Amy and her siblings.
Even though they have visited their institutionalized sister on holidays, it turns out Jacob and Maggie have largely ignored her and Amy is little better than a stranger to them. Nor do they know what to make of the mix of jokes and movie quotations that is part and parcel of Amy’s conversation, and do not listen.

As the ride goes forward, Kathy leads Jacob and Maggie to the realization that Amy is more self-aware than they realized, and that they have neglected her.
Blum and Monk are old pros and Aspillaga is shamelessly funny as the actors navigate their way in, out and around the melodrama and sentimentality that punctuate their unlikely journey.
Meanwhile, the roots of Amy’s neglect are gradually revealed in the series of flashbacks to the 1960s that occur along the way.  Jamie Brewer as the play’s title character, with (in front seat) Vanessa Aspillaga as her caregiver and (in back seat) Debra Monk and Mark Blum as her siblings.

We’ve encountered Sarah and Bobby in a couples retreat.  Now we learn that  Sarah has just given birth and is suffering from depression.
Bobby, perpetually horny, and thinks that sex will solve his wife’s problems.  But Sarah is repelled by her husband’s chronic overeating, and it’s not a pretty sight for her or the audience when he takes off his shirt. (It’s another example of what is supposed to be funny but isn’t.)

Eventually, it becomes clear that Sarah and Bobby, both deceased, were the parents of Jacob, Maggie and Amy, and were struggling with trying to determine whether they were capable of caring for an infant daughter with Down syndrome without destroying the rest of their family.
 “Our daughter's name means love. But that's not why we picked it. We picked it 'cause it was the shortest in that book of names. So even though the doctors told us she'll never learn to spell or write, if it was only three letters we said we'd try,” Bobby tells his wife before delivering the ultimatum that trying has proved to be impossible, and that Amy must be institutionalized.
As they reach the end of the road and Bobby’s funeral awaits them, Kathy, the ultimate truth teller, delivers a shocking revelation about Amy's past.

Maggie and Jacob’s vaguely recall Amy’s childhood in a state institution as pleasant— after all their family would take her to the movies every few months.
Kathy sets them straight. Amy was confined in Willowbrook, the hideous Staten Island institution for mentally ill or delayed children that functioned as a “human warehouse” and shut down in 1987.
Willowbrook was filled to more than double its capacity. But crowding was the least of the horrors. Some residents were reportedly used as test cases for hepatitis studies. Others were left to languish, abused and living in squalor with little medical or mental health care.
In truth, Amy’s younger years were years of ongoing suffering.
The information is such an authentic shocker, but that doesn’t mean the laughter is completely shut down.

 Funniest of all (and it really is funny), Maggie stages an uproarious memorial service for her deceased father in a jammed-to-the- rafters Chinese restaurant and (for those who think they’ve seen everything, she utilizes a karaoke machine to deliver her eulogy.
Drawing the play to a conclusion, Amy steps in front of a red velour curtain and delivers a breathtaking monologue comprised of classic lines from the movies she has seen over the years.  It’s funny and emotionally wrenching, and a spellbinding tour de force for Brewer.
“I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody,” she says with absolute conviction, rousing cheers.
And Amy probably could have been had she not been born in a time when the options for treatment were so limited and cruel.

Mixed blessing or not, “Amy and the Orphans” leaves audiences happy and enlightened.
It’s a safe bet, thanks to Ferrentino, they will never think about people with Down syndrome in precisely the same way again.

For more information about the show, and Roundabout’s busy new season visit : Roundabout Theater

‘MY FAIR LADY’ TAKES ON THE 21ST CENTURY

Lauren Ambrose and Company. Photo: Joan MarcusHENRY EDWARDS - New York - May 21, 2018

 A relic of a sexist time? Or a classic that deserves its reputation as the fairest musical ever to grace a Broadway stage? Or both?

The only option available to Bartlett Sher’s lush staging of Lincoln Center Theater’s production of “My Fair Lady” at the Vivian Beaumont is to face those questions head-on.

The result, a somewhat taxing  three hours in length, starts shakily, has its ups and downs and eventually finds its stride in an absolutely wonderful second act that sends the audience home glowing with delight.

After all, “My Fair Lady” is 62 years old and has not been seen on Broadway in 25 years.  Of all things, it is making its return during the tempestuous year in which the explosive #MeToo movement exploded into view.Lauren Ambrose. Photo: Joan Marcus.
Against that backdrop, what is one to make of a Cinderella-style fairy tale in which an overbearing male “genius” transforms a meager and inadequate woman into his personal ideal of womanhood?
How sexist does that sound in 2018?

Don’t expect an affirmative response from those who love this musical —and that includes just about anyone who loves musical theater.  
The show is a musical version of the most popular of George Bernard Shaw’s 61 plays, “Pygmalion,” written in 1913, with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner (book and lyrics) and music by Frederick Loewe.

Their stupendous success ran a record setting 2,717 performances and earned six Tony awards, including Best Musical.  In 1964, George Cukor’s film rendering garnered eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and was eventually named the 91st greatest American film of all time by the American Film Institute.

Unlike any other musical, the shoe features a hero and heroine that neither touch nor kiss.  Yet Eliza Doolittle (Lauren Ambrose) and Professor Henry Higgins (Harry Hadden-Paton) are two of the most beloved characters in theatre history.

Shaw’s play was written and set in 1913 Edwardian London and so is the musical.
It was a time in which the upper classes and the elites played by a strict set of rules that revolved around wealth, birth and perfect manners and paid little or no attention towards the improvement of the lives of the needy working classes. Per usual, beggars can’t be choosers and the working class was so preoccupied in the daily battle of arranging a square meal nothing else meant anything to them.Harry Hadden-Payton, Photo: Joan Marcus.

The musical presents a working-class Eliza who is too uncouth to be employed in a flower shop and is forced to sell small bouquets to passers-by.

One evening, she encounters upper-class phonetics professor Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering (Allan Corduner), who enjoy discussing her almost impenetrable Cockney accent, but cannot see her as a human being, merely an object that may perhaps be improved upon.  Higgins makes the claim he could fool anyone into thinking her a lady with only a few months training in upper-class diction and etiquette.

In her determination to find a better life for herself, the spunky flower girl approaches Higgins for lessons. He agrees to take on the "gutter snipe" after Pickering and he wager that after six months’ training, he can fool people into thinking that Eliza into a duchess.
In a series of scenes that resemble water boarding, Eliza is challenged to refine and improve herself. Defying all odds, she masters the training and succeeds in giving an unshakable performance at the Ambassador's Ball as a "proper" English lady.

However, when Higgins fails even to give her a sliver of the credit for the achievement, she runs away from Higgins's care and returns to the streets. He tracks her down and, despite a long valid list of grievances against him and even after a devastating and seemingly decisive fight, she returns to him in what seems like a complacent domestic triumph for the professor.

Shaw was unshakeable in his belief that Eliza and Higgins would ultimately go their separate ways. But the conclusion of the musical reflected the desire of audiences for a happy ending. Eliza’s submission may shock today but was perfectly acceptable in the mid-1950s.
Ironically, against Shaw's wishes, a happy ending had previously been added to the 1938 movie version of the play, and even though the playwright let it slip by, he never stopped bitching about it (even when he shared an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay).

Bartlett Sher is the resident director of Lincoln Center Theater and his impeccable productions of “South Pacific” and “The King and I” for Lincoln Center and “Fiddler on the Roof” for Broadway have been highlights of recent theatre seasons. So it makes perfect sense that he would assume the mission of creating a “My Fair Lady” for the 21st century.

First and foremost, the director had to confront the fact of life that the character of Eliza has always been overshadowed by that of Higgins.  But in reality, Eliza really is the protagonist and in reality, “My Fair Lady” concerns musical a young woman who seizes the opportunity to escape from a life of poverty, becomes progressively more her own woman, resisting domination by others and grasping that independence offers her new roles and possibilities.

Sher is helped considerably by the superlative casting of Lauren Ambrose and Harry Hadden-Paton.
Ambrose is an absolutely wonderful actress and as it turns out a terrific singer (her emotionally driven “I Could Have Danced All Night” is a deserved show stopper) and she is a stunning Eliza.
Beat by beat, the actress creates the complicated path of a young woman who grows up before our very eyes and becomes fully herself.Lauren Ambrose & Harry Hadden-Payton, Photo: Joan Marcus.
Ambrose charms as the wailing and childlike flower-seller in the opening scenes, proves to be a comic delight when she makes her first entrance into Henry Higgins’s posh world, and is legitimately heartbreaking when she comes to realization that her new persona isolates her from the world she came from and makes her an imposter in Higgins’s ultra-refined world.
Hadden-Paton (perhaps best known for his TV role as Herbert Pelham, 7th Marquess of Hexham, in “Downton Abbey”) is a marvelous Higgins.

The actor allows us to see the character for exactly what he is. Hadden-Paton’s Higgins is a bully and a baby who thinks he knows everything but doesn’t know that viewing people chiefly as scientific subject matter disallows him of allowing another person to be important to him.
Hadden-Paton also does a terrific job with his songs (“I’m an Ordinary Man,” “A Hymn to Him,” the glorious “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”).
But let’s face it. Those songs could pass as anthems of misogyny.  In “A Hymn to Him,” he does ask, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”
That comes shortly after he says women’s “heads are full of cotton, hay and rags” calls men a “marvelous sex.”

Nor can one deny that browbeating and degrading Eliza into refinement certifies the arrogant professor as a verbal abuser.

Frankly, there’s no getting around it.  Higgins’s songs are dated. And what makes the character tolerable today is the pleasure the audience derives from Eliza’s transformation not as a “fair lady,” but as a full-fledged woman.

As for that long ago ending? Not a word is changed, but this time around, Eliza most certainly does not submit, and the curtain rings down on a brilliant final image that hurls the show to the 21st century.
“My Fair Lady” is long, it’s fascinating and it’s well worth seeing.

For tickets or more information: Visit - Lincoln Center Theater