By: Julia West
If the Beacon is your lodestar for live music, comedy and variety in the neighborhood, walk less than two blocks uptown on Broadway to find world-class plays, musicals and more at WP Theater, between 76th and 77th.
With all the gossip and grubby linen that’s aired every day in the cafes and restaurants up and down the blocks around the theater, it’s fitting that WP’s opening play of its 2024-2025 season is called Dirty Laundry.
We asked the playwright, Mathilde Dratwa, the basic question every showgoer wants to know, what’s the play about? She didn’t gloss over the truth.
“I found out on the day my mother died that my father had been having an affair for six years – and I wrote a play about it,” she said. That sounds sad at best, harrowing at worst. Well, yes, but, she added: “It’s actually very funny…and absurd.”
There’s even a washing machine, of sorts, on stage. And a chorus sharing the unspoken thoughts of the main characters – played by a star-studded cast. “You know, he’s choosing to talk about the laundry but he’s trying to say ‘I miss you and I love you’,” Dratwa says of the father character.
Dratwa is Belgian and moved here in 2008 and although she lives in Brooklyn now, her first “landing pad” in the United States was the Upper West Side. Dirty Laundry takes place somewhere in that emotional gap between small town America and the concrete jungle.
It’s essentially about her family, your family, every family, but Dratwa’s tragi-comic take on her experience and the unusual staging makes this show far from ordinary.
“Yeah, it’s a wild one,” said Rebecca Martínez, the director, with a huge grin. When she first read the script, she said, she was not only excited but “really, really moved.”
That other reflexive question potential showgoers wonder: who’s the play for? Of course it’s for everyone, Martínez said, and that includes “anyone who has or has had a sticky relationship with their parents, anyone who is dealing with really absurd things happening in familial relationships that they do not expect, anyone who’s encountered grief.”
Martínez, who also lives in Brooklyn, loves working in the nabe – appreciates that she can take the 2 Train all the way to 72nd and then just walk four blocks to the theater, picking up groceries at Fairway on the way. She’s worked with WP for several years and has her local fave cafes, stores and Thai restaurant and loves the nearby playground where her partner has brought their young daughter to play, maybe give her a tour backstage at the theater and then go get Mexican food.
Martínez has been fascinated by the history of WP’s space. Starting from when this was the land of the Lenape and Broadway was an ancient trading route and ending in a space with a modern theater was briefly a church before it was a high-rise.
WP Theater exclusively produces new work by Women+ artists and is almost 50 years old, with offices over on West End Avenue and, for the last 10 years, the theater on Broadway where artists, many of whom launched here, have gone on to win Pulitzers and Tonys. This year’s Tony Award for best director of a musical and Pulitzer Prize for Drama were won by artists who got their big break at WP.
Many people involved with WP, both on stage and behind the scenes, are Upper West Siders and local city councilor and past borough president Gail Brewer likes to drop in on WP events as well.
WP’s Producing Artistic Director, Lisa McNulty, said: “We love making our home on the Upper West Side, and we truly love welcoming the neighborhood to see our work! Dirty Laundry is such a funny, heartfelt, vivid piece of theater, performed by a cast of brilliant stage and screen veterans (including a couple of Upper West Siders!) – we can’t wait to share it with you. We hope you’ll swing by on your way home from work, catch a matinée after brunch with your pals at Cafe Lux, or take in a show for a date night in the nabe! We have prices for all pockets – grab a drink and snacks in our fourth floor lounge before or after the show and lose yourself in a quality slice of theater culture right here in your own neighborhood.”
Dirty Laundry runs until October 20th at WP Theater at 2162 Broadway. Tickets are available at wptheater.org
This is a stellar production of a play that will stay with you. Bravo to WP and everyone involved! Run don’t walk to see this!