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Woman Plays The Straight Man In Search For Self
by | Dec 13, 2023 11:38 am
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Posted to: Theater
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Lameece Issaq stars in Waterwell's 'A Good Day To Me Not To You.'
A Good Day To Me Not To You
The Connelly Theater
220 E 4th St.
New York City
Runs through 12/16
By the time Lameece arrives at St. Agnes Residence at the beginning of A Good Day To Me Not To You, a lot has already gone wrong. She got fired from her job as a dental lab technician, a job she took only because she dropped out of dental school. Her sister died in childbirth, leaving her in a strained co-parenting agreement with her brother-in-law. She’s in her mid-40s and trying not to burn through her minimal savings. In short, she’s a woman in a one-woman show flailing in the hyper-specific avalanche of ways women in one-woman shows tend to do.
So when halfway through the play, Lameece sneaks Gabe, a 20-something man dressed as an angel, into her women’s‑only residence to take a mold of his teeth, pay him for sex, and steal his semen-filled condom to get herself pregnant, it almost feels like it shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Every detail of the encounter is shocking, but Issaq plays it for tenderness. She hurries the audience past major moral questions in an attempt to tell a story about a woman trying to heal herself by any means necessary.
Written and performed by Lameece Issaq, A Good Day To Me Not To You is a rich if overcrowded solo show running at Connelly Theater. Produced by Waterwell, an off-Broadway company dedicated to plays that grapple with “complex civic questions,” the 70-minute monologue tackles religion, sexual trauma, and maternal mortality.
The story starts when a lost Lameece moves into St. Agnes Residence on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Over the following months she tries to find and recover herself – to alternately funny and wrenching ends. In addition to narrating as her fictionalized dramatic persona, Issaq plays everyone else in Lameece’s world.
Throughout the show, she takes on a crotchety homeless woman, a nun who deadlifts, her 5‑year-old nephew and her late sister, an avid environmentalist. Each new character Issaq introduces -– like each new theme the play begins to cover — has fascinating potential. Yet the more Issaq bounces between them, the harder it is to know where to look.
Issaq is engaging as the play’s narrator. She uses the space’s intimacy to her advantage, making direct eye contact with audience members and calibrating micro-shifts in her delivery from their reactions to her story’s turns.
Even the more dire and concerning aspects of the play she approaches with a general affect of “Isn’t that weird??” She’s positioned as the play’s straight man, surrounded by weird people and facing the weird things that happen to her. It’s a tactic that probably helps her navigate the wide-ranging monologue with better dexterity, but it inadvertently flattens the narrator’s own extraordinary life circumstances.
Early on, Lameece tosses out that she hasn’t had sex in 10 years. It’s an unusual detail but one she justifies with self-deprecating humor. Later on, she alarmingly reveals that the last person she had sex with was a dental school classmate who filed her teeth down to “perfect” them, leaving her robbed of her selfhood and debilitated by bouts of vertigo triggered by doing dental work. The play brushes by the first anecdote and lingers on the second but never quite connects the dots.
Issaq’s writing has the narrator straddle experiencing the events of the play and recounting them. She’ll often be in a scene with another character, switching between the two voices and postures, when she turns out to the audience to describe a physical interaction or a share thought that pops into her mind.
Under Lee Sunday Evans’s fluid direction, Issaq’s shifts in and out of storytelling mode are clear. Still, the monologue is dulled by the sense that the narrator is simultaneously already over the emotional implications of the play’s events and that she hasn’t actually processed them.
As the play goes on, the gravitational force at its center comes into focus. As Lameece’s brother-in-law reveals his plan to move to Florida and she (somewhat inexplicably, at the request of her mother) tries to have a baby of her own, it becomes clear that the monologues wandering has been, in part, a way to avoid delving into her sister’s death.
Slowly, she introduces us to pieces of her sister – her moral compulsion to compost, her sense of humor, the eggs she froze and left to Lameece in her will. There, Issaq uncovers a richness that other parts of the play forgo in favor of broad archetypes or distracting tangents. I wondered if there were actually three or four separate shows rolled into A Good Day To Me Not You and if this was the one Issaq most wanted to write.
Ultimately, A Good Day To Me Not To You tells a compelling story, and an important one. But packed to the brim with characters and themes that tend to fall by the wayside, it undermines its own ability to coalesce into something bigger. The story might have functioned better as miniseries, a small-cast play, or another format that would give it more breathing room. There, Issaq wouldn’t have to be be stretched so thin – and she wouldn’t be so alone.
