Review: ‘All of Me’ Levels Some Complicated Playing Fields - The Village Voice (2024)

In the before times, you’d go to a play and the usher would hand you a program that told you, in addition to the names of the characters and the actors playing them, useful things like when the action was taking place, and where. If time were to pass between the first act and the second, you’d learn that too.

Nowadays, forget it. At most Off-Broadway venues you’re lucky to be handed a card with a QR code, so you can fiddle with your phone and try to unleash random data before a disembodied voice orders you to put the phone away. The other night I saw playwright Laura Winters’s wonderful All of Me at the Pershing Square Signature Center, a multiple-stage Off-Broadway complex. After the show, I googled notices of its 2022 world premiere at Barrington Stage, in Massachusetts, where reviewers, perhaps provided with actual programs, had discovered that the piece is set in Schenectady, New York, in 2018.

All of Me is, in the old-fashioned sense, a well-made play, a romantic comedy with important details that lift it far above the ordinary. The romantic leads use powered wheelchairs (in real life, as well as in the show) and a tablet-driven text-to-speech program called augmentative and alternative communication (AAC, made famous by scientist Stephen Hawking). Though the high-tech devices lead to occasional gaps in conversation and, initially, to a certain lack of affect, this is ultimately overcome by the talent of the actors.

Over the course of two acts, which fly by, the lead characters roll into trouble and work their way out of it.

The story is complicated by the radical difference in the characters’ economic and educational status. The female lead, Lucy (Madison Ferris, the first actor in a wheelchair to play a major role on Broadway, in The Glass Menagerie) has muscular dystrophy, in the story and in life. Her love interest, Alfonso (Danny J. Gomez), was paralyzed in infancy by a surgical mistake (in real life, eight years ago, the result of a mountain bike accident). Within moments of their meeting, on the loading dock of a medical facility where each is waiting for a ride, they’re talking about sex and planning a rendezvous somewhere more private. She’s a high school grad, and was a locally renowned jazz singer until her degenerative disease kidnapped her consonants. He’s a medical researcher with advanced degrees and a trust fund, recently arrived in town to take a new job.

Both have grown up in single-parent households with highly protective mothers. Lucy’s high-strung mom, Connie (Kyra Sedgwick), a person of faith who believes their time would be better spent praying, is herself afflicted with major back pain, which she douses with red wine. Alfonso’s Manhattan-based mother, Elena (Florencia Lozano), a South American lawyer busy overseeing the decorating of her son’s new flat, prefers weed or Valium to reduce her stress.

One of the many impressive aspects of this production, directed by Ashley Brooke Monroe, is how clearly the romantic leads, deprived of two major assets of live theater — spoken language and upright physical mobility — communicate genuine heat and passion for each other. Over the course of two acts, which fly by, the two roll into trouble and work their way out of it. Alfonso invites Lucy to move in with him, but she demurs: “Trust me, four months is way too soon to move in together.” She is also worried about how doing so would affect her disability benefits. Issues of class intersect and overlap with the disability challenges constantly in play and conveyed in the sharp writing.

On her first visit to his place, Lucy is awed by its spaciousness. “Being able to go in any room you want. A bed lift. Your house is fancy.”

“Accessibility,” he replies. “So fancy.”

She notices the diplomas and prize ribbons hanging on the walls; Alfonso has managed winning sports teams. “So your mom likes to hype you up.”

“She wanted four kids, but got freaked after my accident and put all her energy into me.”

“That sounds like a lot of pressure.”

“I feel like I have to accomplish four kids’ worth of stuff. Damn! I just told you my deepest secrets in three seconds. You’d be a great therapist.”

The talented ensemble is completed by Lucy’s sister, Jackie (Lily Mae Harrington), a manicurist, and Jackie’s underemployed fiancé, Moose (Brian Furey Morabito). That pair’s impending wedding provides fodder for emotional upheaval on everyone’s part. Brett Banakis and Edward T. Morris’s flexible set and Reza Behjat’s lighting assist the transitions among several environments, rapidly turning the squalor of Lucy’s crowded home into the cool elegance of Alfonso’s roomy new digs. Costume designer Sarah LeFeber, also in a wheelchair (the show’s assistant stage manager, assistant sound designer, and lighting designer all have disabilities), has a deep understanding of how to dress people confined to chairs; in particular, she has produced excellent wedding outfits.

The ending is sublime — I won’t spoil it except to say that it recalls Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. On our way out of the theater, a young woman in a wheelchair observed that she’d loved the show and really wanted to see a sequel. Well, me too, and why not a miniseries, a whole season, a franchise like Roseanne that follows these plucky young people out of their “two different worlds” and into a radical future? ❖

A series of events and post-show conversations will explore various facets of the play; for details, visit thenewgroup.org.

All of Me
Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
Pershing Square Signature Center
480 West 42nd Street
Through June 16

Elizabeth Zimmer has written about dance, theater, and books for theVillage Voiceand other publications since 1983. She runs writing workshops for students and professionals across the country, has studied many forms of dance, and has taught in the Hollins University MFA dance program.

Advertising disclosure: We may receive compensation for some of the links in our stories. Thank you for supporting the Village Voice and our advertisers.