Jamie Brewer works wonders with recycled dialogue. As one of three anxiously reunited adult siblings in “Amy and the Orphans,” the insightful but uneven new play by Lindsey Ferrentino, Brewer frequently speaks in vintage movie quotations. Her character — the Amy of the title — is given to stopping conversations with lines like, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”
You may have known ardent cinephiles with this habit and found it more than a bit tedious.
But Brewer’s Amy delivers such well-worn gems from films past with a fresh conviction that feels both buoyant and angry — and highly personal. Her brother, Jacob (Mark Blum), and sister, Maggie (Debra Monk), don’t know what to make of such interjections and tend to ignore them, as if Amy’s mimicry was as unthinking as a mynah bird’s.
That’s only because they’re not listening. By the end of this production, which opened Thursday night at the Laura Pels Theater, we have come to appreciate the eloquence in Amy’s non sequiturs and to understand them as part of an armor she’s assembled to exist in a world that has seldom been kind to her.
Amy, like the actress playing her, has Down syndrome. So did the woman, also named Amy, on which this character is based. She was Ferrentino’s aunt, who spent most of her life in state-funded institutions. “Amy and the Orphans” is a playwright’s attempt to understand a perplexing, guilt-making figure from her childhood and to come to terms with her grandparents’ abandonment of a disabled daughter.
As she demonstrated in “Ugly Lies the Bone,” her 2015 portrait of a badly disfigured U.S. veteran of the war in Afghanistan, Ferrentino possesses a muscular empathy which seeks to enter the minds of people for whom life is often a struggle of heroic proportions. It was Ferrentino who insisted that an actress with Down syndrome be cast as Amy in her latest play. (At certain performances, Brewer’s role is portrayed by Edward Barbanell, in a gender-tweaked variation, “Andy and the Orphans.”)
Certainly, Brewer’s presence lends a compelling center of gravity to “Amy and the Orphans,” a Roundabout Theater Company production directed without much zest by Scott Ellis. She dominates the stage without effort. (Her credits include roles in “American Horror Story” on the FX channel.) And neither she nor the script patronizes her character, who turns out to be far more self-aware and purposeful than her siblings realize.
The problem is much of what surrounds her. The squabbling Maggie and Jacob have been accoutered with those bright, jumbo-size neuroses and eccentricities that are often found in dysfunctional-family sitcoms. Despite eager performances from Blum and Monk, those most reliable of pros, their characters feel cut from shiny, synthetic cloth.
The same might be said of Vanessa Aspillaga’s lovably overbearing Kathy, the loudmouthed but big-hearted Italian nurse, who is tending to Amy in the Queens institution where Maggie and Jacob come to visit. They arrive bearing grim news. Dad is dead, and although it’s already been several months since Mom’s demise, they have yet to tell Amy about either one.
And thus begins what might be called a road trip — in the tradition of that prototypical unhappy, car-bound family movie, “Little Miss Sunshine” — as the three siblings (and the pushy Kathy, who insists that she drive) travel across Long Island to lay Dad to rest and to clear out his house, a place that was never home to Amy.
Maggie becomes carsick, Jacob kvetches, Kathy delivers monologues with subtexts of disapproval about Amy’s relatives, and Amy takes inventory of the passing nail salons along the highway. (Rachel Hauck did the functional sets, which are as depressing as they are surely meant to be.)
Revelations about the sister they never really knew await Maggie and Jacob at the end of the road. These are of such a grimness that when a certain notorious place is uttered by Kathy, my audience gasped collectively.
And it is here that I suppose I should tell you that “Amy and the Orphans” has two hitherto unmentioned characters. They are convincingly played by Diane Davis and Josh McDermitt, who appear in self-contained scenes that punctuate the story of the siblings. I guess it’s kind of a spoiler (stop reading if you must) to say that what’s happening in these scenes is the conversation that will determine the infant Amy’s future.
And if you’re still reading, yes, these are Amy’s parents here, several decades earlier, trying to determine if it’s possible for them to care for an infant daughter with Down syndrome without destroying the rest of their family. What’s most remarkable about these scenes is the degree to which we accept the potency of this couple’s love for each other. And as in other families — although I would wager not the majority — their love is the first priority.
The exclusiveness of that affection may explain in part why Jacob and Maggie are so ill-equipped to deal with adult life. “Isn’t there a grown-up who can take care of this for us?” Maggie wails, referring to planning the funeral, when she meets Jacob at the airport. She also keeps crying out, “We’re orphans now!”
There are orphans and then there are orphans, though. And the more we learn about Amy, the less we feel able to sympathize with Jacob and Maggie. I think Ferrentino over-eggs their obnoxiousness in this regard, to make the contrast more apparent.
She doesn’t need to. Amy is more than capable of making her own, implicit case. Wisely, Ferrentino allows Amy to have the last word — or words — in a curtain-closing monologue made up entirely of her beloved film quotations. And while you’ve probably heard most of these words before, it’s unlikely they’ve ever had the defiant, heartbroken resonance they acquire here.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.