Unlike the characters they play in Just Another Day, The Bad Seed Oscar nominee Patty McCormack and The Wonder Years star Dan Lauria are still sharp as tacks, but sadly I can’t add my voice to those who have raved about Lauria’s overly wordy Alzheimer’s-themed comedy, now wrapping up its run at the Odyssey.

 On paper at least, Just Another Day sounds more than promising, which is why I expected to be charmed by the veteran duo as characters living with dementia who meet on a daily basis but believe that each new meeting is their very first.

The possibilities for both comedy and romance seemed endless as I imagined their relationship deepening with each passing day, no matter that their memories were wiped clean with each new morning.

That, however, appears not to be what playwright Lauria had in mind either for his characters or the audience when putting pen to paper.

Instead we spend Just Another Day’s entire first act on a single “first encounter” in what appears at first to be a public park but what we eventually realize are the grounds of an assisted care facility. (Someone out of view keeps ringing an obnoxiously loud bell whenever the two characters even so much as touch each other.)

As to why Lauria’s Man and McCormack’s Woman have been committed either voluntarily or involuntarily to such a facility, there’s virtually nothing in their initial, extended verbal sparring to indicate that either has memory or mental acuity issues.

True, they mostly wax about the past, in particular about their love for classic black-and-white movies, but even among the sharpest-minded people I know, there’s no one who peppers their speech with anywhere near as much highfalutin vocabulary as Woman does in lines like these:

 “I shall winnow you from my list of acquaintances.” “I’m sure your demise would be lauded by many.” “I’m depleted of words.” “She directed me here under the misapprehension that I was destined to sit here.”

Neither Man nor Woman seem to lose their train of thought, neither repeats what they’ve just said a minute ago unaware that they’ve already said it, nor do either of them appear to exhibit any other significant signs of memory loss, at least not in Act One.

As for the other two days of these two characters’ lives that we observe after intermission, in the first one playwright Lauria’s Man suddenly takes to engaging in snappy-patter back-and-fourth interchanges with the audience as if we’re not in a completely different play, and by the time the play’s final scene rolls around, though it is heartbreaking to see McCormack’s Woman in the final stages of Alzheimer’s, by then I’d pretty much tuned out.

I can’t really blame director Eric Krebs for any of this, since the fault as I see it is in Lauria’s script, and on the plus side audiences will find much to relish in seeing the actor who played Fred Savage’s father for six seasons on The Wonder Years up close and personal on stage.

Still, the best reason not to pass on Just Another Day is the chance to see the still-radiant-at-80 McCormack prove that her Oscar nomination (and her Golden Globe win) for playing the evilest preteen ever to wreak havoc on those around her was no fluke because the performance she gives here is razor sharp and utterly charming to boot.

Kudos too to scenic designer Pete Hickok for his lovely take on Christopher Swader and Justin Swader’s design for Just Another Day’s 2023 East Coast debut (the one shown in production stills, not Hickok’s).

Michael Blenderman’s lighting design and Ramiro Hermosillo’s sound engineering are topnotch too, and the title song that Air Supply’s Graham Russel has written for the show sets an appropriately nostalgic tone as accompaniment to a series of pre-show and post-intermission black-and-white Golden Era movie stills.

Just Another Day is produced for the Odyssey by Beth Hogan and presented by the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble. Katie Chabot is stage manager and Fitz Freebie is production manager. Lucy Pollak is publicist.

It may have been a mistake on my part to make assumptions about what Just Another Day would be before seeing it, but even had I gone in without expectations, I think the end result would have been the same. This just wasn’t my cup of tea.

Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, 2055 South Sepulveda Boulevard, Los Angeles.
www.odysseytheatre.com

–Steven Stanley
September 21, 2025
Photos: Kathy Portie

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Tags: Dan Lauria, Los Angeles Theater Review, Odyssey Theatre, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble