David Adjmi’s new play, set in the enclave of Syrian Jews of Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood, gives us a look into that prosperous but highly isolated community in which he himself grew up. It opens with a bang-up scene to introduce us to Lily, one of our two protagonists; in rapid-fire comic dialogue of a brevity suggests Beckett or Mamet, the not-quite-seventeen-year-old Lily (the flexible Laura Heisler) recounts her Caribbean honeymoon with Ike, whom she wed by arrangement, to her older sister Shelly and friend Claudine. Flighty Lily, who insists on telling us how mature she is, seems obsessed by her peeling sunburn.
Back in Brooklyn and setting up housekeeping, she hires Blanche as a live-in maid. Even though Blanche is African-American, Lily insists on speaking Spanish to her because she’s always had Puerto Rican servants before. Blanche (the charming Quincy Tyler Bernstine) is apparently down on her luck temporarily but waiting for it to turn with an expected job in academia. Blanche is biding her time, and she can be ingratiating or firm, as need be.
Blanche catalyzes Lily’s attempt to break out of her own ivory tower, the stultifying environment of this hidebound community where she is encouraged to do nothing but go shopping, symbolized by a two-level set by Daniel Conway painted (and repainted in the course of the evening) in nothing but white. Unfortunately, the set (which owes something to Woolly’s recent set for The Clean House) at times is too much a character, with mirrors that offer intended and unintended looks into the house and backstage, and balky sliding panels.
Lily’s community is nevertheless childishly naive at times, as when Shelly uses Pig Latin to tell something to Lily in Blanche’s presence, assuming that she won’t understand.
Alas, neither Lily’s effort to fly free nor Blanche’s attempts to find security (Ike is her brutal Stanley Kowalski antagonist, played as a nasty piece of work by Michael Gabriel Goodfriend) come to a good end, and one that doesn’t feel fully earned. Adjmi shows us that the cruelty of this culture is something it shares with the rest of the world without achieving a universality.
- Stunning, by David Adjmi, directed by Anne Kauffmann, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington