Dirty Laundry – 10 October 2024

Dirty Laundry at WP Theater examined the relationship of a daughter and her father after the daughter found out her father had been having a multi year affair while her mother died of cancer. Structurally, it used three Greek Chorus style narrators to say the unsaid in a story that, for a lot of families, would have faded into the “I don’t know, we never discussed it” category of family history and been forgotten. At times, these narrators spoke the characters’ thoughts, and, towards the end, posed interesting questions about how this story might be told differently depending on who passed it along. Heartwarming and hilarious, these characters never had a dull moment (though they wished for one). Stress and pressure morph memories and strain relationships but, at the end of the day, loss is a constant that binds people together, grounding them in themselves and each other.

The hovering narrators added a lot to the cadence of the play and added dimensions and ideas that provided just the right amount of embellishment on the characters in the story. While this could have been a two or three person story where the audience only understood it through the lens of what had happened, the story would have struggled to hold its own that way, and it was these thoughts and additional commentaries that were psychologically interesting—there was enough subtext and dimensionality in what’s left unsaid to warrant not one, not two, but three additional people on stage to express it.

My main critique is that I wanted to know who these narrators were in relation to the characters in the play. They were not dressed in an otherworldly way; they were dressed in regular clothing that did not match the characterizations they portrayed most frequently (ex. the feminine cut silk floral for the husband) or any characteristics discernable about that specific narrator. They didn’t even look like a cohesive unit, and they were named “red”, “blue”, and “green”, but I had to look up in the playbill who was supposed to be which because none of them were really wearing any of those colors. The randomness of these characters was just too random. I wanted to know if they were related to each other or the characters, if they were even on the same plane of existence, if they were descendants or observers or ancestors… It would have been exceptionally meaningful if we were able to link these characters to the ones whose story they were telling, especially because at the end they made a big point of asking the audience how the story would change if told by Luca or Luca’s child or Luca’s wife or someone Luca cheated on or with—it would have been an interesting moment to clarify for the audience how these specific narrators fit into the story and why it mattered to them. What were the stakes for them?

Despite that lengthy paragraph of questions, Dirty Laundry was incredibly moving, interesting, and engaging, especially in the way it smoothly crossed genres and ideas. There were moments that were exceptionally funny, and even though we didn’t all cry at the same moment in the play, everyone in the house brushed away a tear at some point. These characters were simple, powerful, beautiful, relatable, and flawed. I walked out with a very real sense of catharsis in how loss hurts and heals and reveals sides of ourselves and others that we never expected. These big picture ideas are actually as universal as doing the laundry. That dial says a million different things. We don’t know what they are or what we’re doing or how we fit into them. We just know that we’re here and we’d like things to be a little cleaner, a little simpler, and a little less messy. Along the way, we ruin a blazer. We don’t know what to feel. We ask advice from the person we want to talk to, not the person who wants to hear us. It’s the cycle of life.

I attended this performance on a press pass from Vivacity Media Group.