Amy and the Orphans

I haven't seen a play in about a year.  That's the longest I've gone without going to the theatre since I moved to New York City.  That's partly because the musicals lately don't appeal to me enough to make me interested in going, partly because almost all the major straight plays that do appeal to me now have movie or TV stars in them (and I have no desire to part with my money to see a screen star who's never been theatrically trained and is more famous for their face than their acting mumble or shout their way through a play that has been overpriced because they're in it), and partly just because theatre prices have grown ridiculously over the last few years.

But I really needed to see a play.  I needed to get lost in someone else's story for an evening.  So I was delighted when I got an offer for Roundabout Theatre's Hiptix tickets to their production of Amy and the Orphans.  Plays that explore how families treat and deal with disabled family members always appeal to me because I have an uncle with both brain damage and a physical disability from the Vietnam War.  There are rarely easy answers when it comes to what's best for him, so I appreciate a play that explores that theme with sensitivity, curiosity, compassion, and a recognition of the many shades of grey and frequent lack of a clear black and white.  Add to the mix the supremely talented Debra Monk and my fiancé's enthusiastic endorsement of his colleague from Broadway's 12 Angry Men, Mark Blum, and I was sold.

But having been a stage manager for years has certain lasting effects on my theatre-going experience.  It can be a little harder for me to get into a play at the beginning rather than observing the mechanics behind it.  The first thing I did after sitting down was proofread the bios -- total lack of consistency between commas and semi-colons, both between and within bios.  Next I proofread the playwright's note in the program.  Once the play started, I found myself assessing the jeans of one of the characters on stage, which had entirely too much elastic stretch in them for the period in which they were supposed to exist (which I'm still a bit fuzzy on but I think from music choice was 1969), and wondering whether the hippie-inspired outfit would even have been what a character that age who seems rather uptight and has three children would have actually worn then, or if its purpose was more to help the audience establish time period than to be true to the character -- and if so, if there might be a more effective way to do both at the same time.  Next I tried to figure out the physical setting, which for some reason I was having the hardest time doing.  Though the two characters referred to being at a couple's retreat, I couldn't actually figure out what type of room they were in (a surprisingly distracting problem) until a character finally specified it was a hotel room at what felt like ten minutes in.  Though the set had the requisite fire escape map that might have served as an essential clue, I've never before seen a hotel room with chairs stacked on top of each other by the door, and that single fact kept me from being able to properly identify the location.

As we moved into the present day (or something close to it -- the age of the actors and the characters' familial relationships make figuring out exact time periods an impossible task), I was drawn more into the world of the characters but again pulled out by a setting problem.  The second scene takes place at LaGuardia Airport, and of course there are no other actors to play all the passengers who would be in the waiting area and baggage claim besides the two main characters.  I had no problem with this, my mind automatically filling in the other people who would of course be walking around, until one of the characters acknowledged the presence of other people -- off stage.  Out of view.  As if the only people around them were physically out of the literal space viewable to the audience -- which of course would be absurd.  Had they acknowledged people right in front of them, who were simply invisible to us, it wouldn't have even registered to me, but by trying to make the space literal, it brought my suspended disbelief crashing to the floor for a moment.

And yet, technical issues aside, something happened over the next hour that drew me so into the play and the characters on stage that I cried twice by the end.  In one timeline we watch Amy's parents decide whether to give up their daughter born with Down Syndrome to a state-run institution, and in the other, we watch the consequences nearly 50 years later of the decision at which we know they'll arrive.  And once we dispense with the difficulty of figuring out relationships and settings and time periods and ages, the trio of actors playing siblings (Debra Monk, Mark Blum, and the terrific Jamie Brewer -- the Down Syndrome "Amy" of the title of the play) are allowed to simply live in those relationships as they try to navigate the mistakes of the past and the reality of the present.

It's a play where a character I intensely disliked from the start (Amy's nurse, played with officious and brash realism by Vanessa Aspillaga) is perhaps the only character with a crystal clear view of right and wrong and truth, the only character besides Amy who can live with a totally clear conscience by the end (and the character won me over -- not an easy feat for a personality type I so dislike).  Meanwhile, the first two characters we see on stage, whom we are drawn into rooting for, might just be the villains.  And yet the conflicting emotions and dilemmas of all the characters are intensely real and multi-faceted.  When Monk's and Blum's characters make an attempt at the end to correct their parents' wrongs in regard to Amy, it turns out to be perhaps the worst thing they could do now for Amy.  Though learning and growth offer hope for a kinder future, the past cannot be undone, nor can its life-altering mistakes always be fixed.

In one of the final scenes of the play, we are offered our first and only glimpse of Amy and her father together during Amy's childhood.  It's a weekend when the family has picked up Amy from the institution in which they've placed her to take her to a movie, and as Amy settles in next to her father in the movie theater, she asks if they're watching the good guys or the bad guys.  He responds that it's not always so easy to tell -- a truth that resonates stronger with his devoted and loving focus on Amy as he delivers the line.

I'm a fan of happy endings, and I'm a fan of escapism theatre.  Amy and the Orphans offers neither, but it offers something just as good: a realistic look at humanity's complex relationships with right and wrong, selfishness and selflessness, what we do to protect our own conscience, and how we treat those who need care beyond what we expected to give.  And what happens to those we discard.