You don’t have to be a stay-at-home nursing mom to fall in love with Molly Smith Metzler’s Cry It Out, but if you are, this one’s especially for you, and it’s about time.

Seriously, when was the last time a playwright put women like Jessie and Lina center stage? How about never, which is just one reason this Echo Theater Company West Coast Premiere is also one of Echo’s funniest and most compelling not to mention touching and endlessly surprising.

 Under ordinary circumstances, even living on either side of back-to-back yards, Jessie Jensen-Gelb (Jackie Chung) and Lina Bustamante (Megan Ketch) might never have met.

Jessie grew up comfortably in the Midwest, graduated law school, married into money, and has been a Manhattan corporate lawyer for the past nine years until a crash c-section made her realize that mothering her now 12-week-old Allison was all she wanted to do into the foreseeable future.

Single-mom Lina, on the other hand, is Long Island Italian all the way, has at best a semester or two of community college under her belt, and lives with Max’s blue-collar baby daddy under his mother’s rent-controlled roof just across from Jessie and her husband’s gentrified duplex just a thirty-five-minute commute from the city.

Then came the day an adult-companionship-starved Jessie approached Lina in the neighborhood Stop ‘n’ Shop and invited her over for some backyard bonding over coffee and shared motherhood, baby monitors allowing each to keep watch over her mostly sleeping infant.

 Playwright Metzler clearly knows of what she writes, from Jessie’s outrage at husband Nate’s milk-and-diapers purchase on the way home from work (“You are in the city all day! You don’t get Stop ’n’ Shop!!”), to Lina’s insistence that sleep-training, aka letting your baby Cry It Out, is barbaric, to questions of  if and when to return to work. (Lina has just twenty-four days left of maternity leave from her hospital job, while Jessie would like nothing better than to stretch hers out indefinitely if she can just summon up the courage to broach the subject to alpha-male Nate.)

 Then, three weeks into their daily coffee klatches, who should show up with an unexpected request but Mitchell (Brian Henderson), one that soon brings Adrienne (Emily Swallow) into Jessie and Lina’s midst, which is already telling you more than you should know, but hey, I can’t write this review without at least mentioning its two remaining cast members.

Indeed, much of the pleasure of experiencing Cry It Out is just how surprising its four characters are and how unpredictable its plot twists prove to be, that and the joy of witnessing four phenomenal performances under Lindsay Allbaugh’s masterful direction.

 Chung’s Jessie is intelligence and warmth personified, most likely a tiger in the courtroom but a mouse where marriage to Nate is concerned, just one reason to stick around in hopes she’ll acquire some backbone.

Ketch is a salty-tongued “Lawng Guyland” delight as Lina, and like her three castmates gets to transition seamlessly from comedy to drama and never more so than when financial realities place more than just mother-son bonding in jeopardy.

 Henderson’s Mitchell and Swallow’s Adrienne are equally fabulous, equally multi-layered, equally impossible to pigeonhole, and to say more would spoil the thrill of discovery.

Cry It Out looks terrific on François-Pierre Couture’s clearly untended, leaf-strew lawn set, lit to perfection by Rose Malone with properties by Clarissa Thibeaux. Ann Closs-Farley gives each character two or three outfits that only she or he would wear. Sound designer master Jeff Gardner underscores with nursery-ready music and believable baby effects.

Cry it Out is produced by Chris Fields and Rachael Zambias. Thibeaux is associate producer. Venice Yue Yang is production stage manager. Casting is by Meg Fister. Nicole DuPort understudies Lina.

Audiences of all persuasions will stand up and cheer Cry It Out, but mothers will most of all. If you are, or know anyone who is, a stay-at-home mom, treat yourself (or her) to a sitter and a hundred minutes of L.A. theater at its most entertaining, thought-provoking, and for those who’ve lived or are living it, cathartic.

The Echo Theater Company @ Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave., Atwater Village.
www.EchoTheaterCompany.com

–Steven Stanley
July 16, 2018
Photos: Darrett Sanders

Tags: Echo Theater Company, Los Angeles Theater Review, Molly Smith Metzler