Actor and writer John Leguizamo cut his teeth on solo shows that opened in small downtown venues and gradually moved uptown to Broadway after he became a known commodity. Those shows—including Sexaholix, Ghetto Klown and Latin History for Morons—feature his dead-on impressions, penetrating observations, juvenile humor and unabashed sentimentality.

 

For his debut play, The Other Americans, Leguizamo relies on sentimentality. He plays Nelson Castro, a Colombian-American who lives in Queens with his wife Patti and daughter Toni, while their son Nick is returning home from a hospital stay after a mental breakdown. Nelson has inherited the family business of laundromats along with his half-sister Norma, who has done a better job expanding her side of the business than he has. 

 

Since Nelson has always wanted to be upwardly mobile, he’s sweated blood and tears trying to get ahead, at work and in life. He moved his family out of Jackson Heights and into Forest Hills, which he assumed was a “better” part of Queens for his family. But Patti hated leaving her old neighborhood and friends, and Nick’s bullying began at his new school, which led to his mental fragility. Only Toni seems levelheaded; yet, although she is engaged to Eddie, who works with her dad, she’s considering leaving New York with Eddie to follow her aunt Norma to California and work at building a business out west.

 

The characters’ interactions and Nelson’s inability to reconcile his personal and professional lives bring to mind Death of a Salesman. He’s no Arthur Miller, but Leguizamo does write funny, even pointed dialogue. Yet, when Nelson’s desperation comes to the surface and it dawns on Patti that he won’t be able to choose his family over his work, the play bogs down in exposition, too-familiar conflicts and a surprising shallowness, culminating in a death telegraphed nearly from the start.

 

As Nelson, Leguizamo is always watchable, while the many women around him are enacted persuasively by Rebecca Jimenez (Toni), Sarah Nina Hayon (Patti’s friend Veronica), Rosa Evangelina Arrendono (Norma) and, most memorable of all, Luna Lauren Velez, whose Patti is a lively, antagonistic presence.

 

Trey Santiago-Hudson is game but one-note as Nick, while Trey’s father, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, directs smoothly on Arnulfo Maldonado’s striking apartment set, which ends up more authentic than the characters inhabiting it.

 

 

 

 

With his cycle of plays that chronicled the Apple, Gabriel, and Michael families, Richard Nelson insightfully showed that everyday lives, relationships and conversations can be as artful and compelling as Shakespeare. Wilson’s latest, When the Hurlyburly’s Done, concerns six women who get together after a 1920 performance of Macbeth, the first production of any Shakespearean play in Ukraine. As it is now, war is in the background. 

 

The play comprises these women talking to one another about their families and their theater work and their  Macbeth director/lead actor, Les Furbas—a real theater eminence from Ukraine, and the (unseen) husband of one of the Macbeth actresses in Nelson’s play, but virtually unknown elsewhere—while they prepare and eat a meal and check on their (unseen) children. As usual for Nelson, two hours onstage equals two hours in these women’s lives, accentuating the feeling that we’re eavesdropping on an intelligent and humorous series of conversations while dinner is being prepared and eaten. The kitchen is filled with talk, laughter, tears, food, and even dance: in other words, real life.

  

Nelson’s writing is never didactic; his chamber dramas double as character studies, delightfully natural dialogue—a la Chekhov—demonstrating that quotidian talk provides as much character dimension as long monologues or showy confrontations. Even when the play stops, so three of the women can practice their scene as Macbeth’s Weird Sisters by performing a dance that gives a glimpse into their relationships with one another and with Shakespeare’s play, it is a wonderfully theatrical moment realized by the actresses and choreographer Charlotte Bydwell.

 

Too bad When the Hurlyburly’s Done ran only for a week at the Public. It must have been difficult to mount: in a post-performance talk, Nelson said he wrote the script in English and had it translated into Ukrainian, a language he does not speak. The superlative actresses—formidable individually and collectively—only arrived in New York right before the run started, so Bydwell had to plan the sisters’ choreography over Zoom calls. That we got it to see it at all, in its quietly haunting eloquence, is a tribute to the ennobling theater of Richard Nelson.