Review: In ‘Brooklyn Laundry,’ There’s No Ordering Off the Menu

Fran and Owen have been chatting for only a few minutes, not all that companionably, when he asks her out. It’s a risky thing to do, since she’s a customer at the drop-off laundry he owns. To Owen, though, Fran resembles his ex-fiancée: “Smart, one inch from terrific, but gloomy,” he says.

So bone-tired of being single that a casual insult from a guy she’s just met isn’t a deal breaker, Fran warily agrees to dinner.

“But I don’t get why you want to, really,” she adds. “I’m not your old gloomy girlfriend. I’m somebody else.”

Owen counters: “Well, whoever you think I am, I’m somebody else, too.”

This is truer than he comprehends. Starring Cecily Strong as Fran and David Zayas as Owen, John Patrick Shanley’s enticingly cast, rather lumpy new play, “Brooklyn Laundry,” can get you thinking about warning labels — those heads-ups that we all ought to come with, so people know what they’re in for when they encounter us.

Fran’s warning label would be long and convoluted, Owen’s even more so. Each of them would be surprised if they read their own. They realize that they’re a little bit broken, in need of repair. They just don’t understand quite how.

Side note to Fran: While Owen seems potentially quite sweet (gruff adorability is Zayas’s bailiwick), he is way more hidebound and a whole lot more self-pitying than he lets on. Run, maybe?

But then we, the audience, would miss out on that dinner date, which is utterly charming, very funny and beautifully underplayed by Strong and Zayas in this world-premiere production, directed by Shanley for Manhattan Theater Club on New York City Center Stage I.

If what you look for in Shanley’s plays is the impassioned, oddball chemistry that made his Academy Award-winning 1987 movie “Moonstruck” a hit, this is the scene for you.

Hoping to alter her general perspective, Fran arrives at the restaurant on mushrooms. Under the trellised greenery and strings of lights, she is a softer, more wonder-struck version of herself, her hand gestures slowed as if the air they move through were textured. (Set design is by Santo Loquasto, costumes by Suzy Benzinger, lighting by Brian MacDevitt.)

Fran shares her stash with Owen, and they become vulnerable with each other — and sincere, and silly. Still, he does insist that she make peace with not being able to order chicken for dinner.

“You must choose from what exists on the menu, Fran, and not choose the invisible thing in your mind,” Owen says.

Understandably, she protests: “But I like the invisible thing best.”

Facing up to sorry reality is a central theme of “Brooklyn Laundry,” a romantic comedy with a penchant for the resolutely dismal. It isn’t advertised as a rom-com, mind you; the marketing suggests it’s about three sisters and a laundry guy. What it’s truly about is one sister and the laundry guy she falls for, with terrible timing, just as her two sisters are really going through some stuff.

Trish (Florencia Lozano, in a thankless role) is dying luridly, lingeringly, in her oppressively dreary trailer home in rural Pennsylvania. Susie (Andrea Syglowski, smartly tapping into anger to make the dialogue work) is at the mercy of her own sudden tragedy.

Yet all of that is in service of Fran and Owen’s story, which turns throwback-traditional toward the end, with nonsensical lines like, “It’s kind of crazy but I’m going to say it. You’re a woman,” and “You gotta excuse me, but I gotta say it. You’re a man, Owen.”

I wonder what “Brooklyn Laundry” might have become if Shanley hadn’t staged it himself — if there had been a director to push him where text needs strengthening; to find a tone that breathes life into Fran’s one scene with Trish; to steer away from visual grimness in design rather than, with the exception of the restaurant scene, straight into it.

That, however, is not on the menu.

Brooklyn Laundry
Through April 14 at New York City Center Stage I, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.