CRY IT OUT


Stay-at-home nursing moms rarely get a center-stage spotlight, which is just one reason to cheer the arrival of Molly Smith Metzler’s funny, compelling, deeply touching dramedy Cry It Out to Orange County’s Chance Theater.

Under ordinary circumstances, Jessie Jensen-Gelb (Aubrey Saverino) and Lina Bustamante (Amanda Zarr) might never have met.

Jessie grew up comfortably in the Midwest, graduated law school, married into money, and had been working for nine years as a Manhattan corporate lawyer when an emergency C-section made her realize that mothering her now 12-week-old daughter was all she wanted to do into the foreseeable future.

Single-mom Lena, on the other hand, is blue-collar “Lawng Guyland” all the way, has no more than a semester or two of community college under her belt, and lives with her son’s Italian-American baby daddy under his mother’s rent-controlled roof just across from Jessie and her husband’s gentrified duplex on Long Island’s North Shore.

And the two women might have continued as strangers had an adult-companionship-starved Jessie not approached Lina in the neighborhood Stop ‘n’ Shop and invited her over for some backyard bonding over coffee, 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 when and if a recent mother ought 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 one morning, who should show up to their daily coffee klatches but their uphill, upscale neighbor Mitchell (Seyto James), and soon after that his wife Adrienne (Angel Dumapias), herself the mother of an infant child, and Cry It Out becomes even richer and more stereotype-defying for their arrival.

Indeed, much of the pleasure of experiencing Cry It Out is discovering how surprising its four characters are and how unpredictable its plot twists prove to be, that and a couple of sensational lead performances that alone make the Chance Theater’s latest a must-see.

Zarr follows her Scenie-winning Outstanding Lead Actress star turns in Good People and The Vandal with arguably her most sensational work to date as salty-tongued Lina, and when financial realities place more than just mother-son bonding in jeopardy, Zarr’s comedic brilliance is matched by some devastating dramatic chops.

Opposite her, Saverino reveals not just Jessie’s warmth and her intelligence but the complexities of a woman as fierce at mothering as she is meek where her marriage is concerned, and her performance only grows deeper and more powerful as the play progresses.

Terrific too are James’s ever so likable Mitchell and Dumapias’s brittle, caustic Adrienne, both of whom defy preconceived notions of parenthood and parenting.

Along the way, Elina de Santos’s direction reveals both the ability to bring out the best from her cast and a particularly impressive use of Bruce Goodrich’s detailed adjoining-backyards set.

Sarah Schwartz’s nuanced lighting, Adriana Lámbarri’s character-defining array of costumes, and sound designer Marc Antonio Pritchett’s mix of effects and between-scene song transitions are as topnotch as Goodrich’s rich neighbor-poor neighbor set.

Bebe Herrera is stage manager.

You don’t have to have shared Jessie and Lina’s life experiences to fall for Cry It Out, but if you know someone who has (yourself included), make sure they add Chance Theater’s latest to their calendar. It’s one of the year’s very best.

Chance Theater, 5522 E. La Palma Ave., Anaheim Hills.
www.chancetheater.com

–Steven Stanley
April 9, 2022
Photos: Camryn Long

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