“I’m a longtime fan of the drop-off laundry,” crows playwright John Patrick Shanley with a certain discernible pride. Somehow, he convinces you he sees more into it than anyone else.
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“First of all,” he tells Observer, “there’s this ceremony you go through when you go in and leave your bag in the laundry. They put it on the scales and look at it and decide how much you are going to pay—but it feels as if they’re, basically, judging a week of your life from the clothes you bring in. That kind of mythological putting-your-soul-on-the-scales goes back a pretty long way.”
The most conspicuous Exhibit A of what he sees is Brooklyn Laundry, a brand-new play (his first since the pandemic). It is installed till the end of the month at New York City Center’s Manhattan Theater Club, which presented numerous Shanleys, including Doubt: A Parable, now getting a splendid Broadway revival at the newly named Todd Haimes Theater in Times Square.
What “inspired” Brooklyn Laundry was the loss of Shanley’s own load of laundry, wrongly rerouted into the stratosphere for strangers to mull over the foreign bundle they have just received. This lost laundry led to another procedure: “Having to come up with a number for a store credit and going over it every time I came in with new laundry.” His bundle has never resurfaced.
This irritating situation prompts, of all things, a love story between a laundry proprietor, Owen (David Zayas), and Fran (Cecily Strong), the customer whose laundry he lost. Beyond the fact both are........