Stuck in the Rinse Cycle

Wouldn’t it be nice if, just once, a play could portray working class people as something more than a collection of sordid tendencies and misguided whimsies? Every blue-collar family seems to be hiding some deep, dark secret that eventually springs out like a deranged Jack-in-the-box, and Dreams of the Washer King is no different. Though at least the two families in [Christopher Wall]’s play don’t have any nasty drug addictions.

Wall’s slippery, sloppy drama concerns teenaged Ryan (Ben Hollandsworth), whose single mother Claire (Carla Harting) is as disconnected from him as she is numb. Ryan spends his free time carrying a microphone around their house and yard, trying to conjure up the sounds of his happier past and maybe a small sign from his dead father. (Whimsy, with an undertow of melancholy.) His new friend Elsie (Reyna de Courcy), meanwhile, writes letters to pen pals around the world, all of whom have problems much more severe than her overly attached father or Ryan’s distant mother. She does this in part to escape her dad (Stevie Ray Dallimore), who has a creepy way of insisting that children act civilized, that is when he’s not disappointing Ryan’s mother on a date. Eventually, the foursome’s failures as people and family converge in one night of horror.

There are flashes of power in Wall’s script, but he relies too heavily on flash forwards for his chilling climax to be fully effective. His story is also hampered by the small stage at Cherry Lane Studio and a bulky set from David Newell. Meant to convey multiple locations, Newell’s set isn’t an entire success since Ryan’s bed, on a raised platform, dominates every scene, whether it’s in Elsie’s house or in a secluded field strewn with abandoned washing machines that Elsie and Ray use for storage.

Director Giovanna Sardelli does elicit fine performances from her quartet of actors, though de Courcy is still as unappealing a teen as she was last year in The Secret Agenda of Trees. Equally unbelievable as both 16-year-old Elsie and her older self, de Courcy’s petulant shrillness hasn’t matured any. Hollandsworth, however, does solid work as the impetuous, lonely Ryan, who is naive enough to believe that he can help Elsie, and Harting is heartbreaking as his struggling mother, a woman who is so busy trying to stop up her own loneliness that she’s forgotten to care about her son. Dallimore, as Elsie’s burly, bearded father, is appropriately menacing in the early scenes, but loses his subtlety in the second act and mostly just yells.

There are powerful theatrical moments scattered throughout, like glittering bits of colored grass in that field of washing machines—particularly a present day dream sequence (or is it an hallucination?) in which the things in Ryan’s home begin to turn to dust. But the moments don’t add up to a wholly successful evening, and Wall would do well to have another go at his script. The back-and-forth in time builds suspense, but the abrupt shifts from past to present (and I do mean abrupt, because Sardelli mostly indicates them by a sudden spotlight and a quick swivel to face the audience from the actor) can be annoying. Walls proves he’s a playwright with plenty of ambition—but that ambition is not fully fulfilled here.

[Dreams of the Washer King]

Through June 26, [Cherry Lane Theatre], 38 Commerce St. (at Bedford St.), 212-239-6200; $31.