You Will Get Sick, playing Off Broadway at the Laura Pels Theater through Sunday, December 11, is the most riveting, and mind-stretching play that I have seen this season because you must pay close attention to know where you are at any given moment. There are more twists and turns than a frog in a blender. Blink, and you are in another world.
I place the blame squarely on the shoulders – and this is a high compliment – on the zany, over-the-top genius of playwright Noah Diaz, the play’s all-seeing and deliciously inventive director Sam Pinkleton, and Linda Lavin the play’s 85-year-old Tony-winning star, who, like Cleopatra entering Rome, is making a triumphant, and long overdue, return to the New York stage.
Marinda Anderson, the hilarious Nate Miller, and Dario J. Sanchez, the play’s three limber-legged cast members who are frequently called upon at the drop of a hat to morph into an entirely new character, more than ably support Lavin, around which all of the action of play swirls.
Along the way, in a whirligig of changing characters and locations, we find ourselves at the home of a dying man, at a telephone booth adjacent to Central Park, at a restaurant, at an acting class, at several auditions, at a hospital, at a cat-filled bodega, and at a wheat farm in the Midwest.
The fun begins with Lavin talking on the phone to Daniel K. Isaac, the play’s second lead, who like Lavin inhabits no other characters other than himself. In the background, like a jet breaking the sound barrier, we hear the screeching of an extremely loud bird. As we find out later, a squadron of large prehistoric-like birds are plucking people off the streets, so frequently that bird kidnapping insurance is being sold.
It seems that Lavin, knee-deep in preparing a report on the “Gentrification And How It Affected the Neighborhoods Between Seventy-First and Forty-Third, Just Between the Park with The Pack of Wild Dogs and that Bodega With All The Cats in It,” while wandering the street, notices a flyer posted on a telephone pole which reads: Wanted: Someone To Call Me I Need To Tell You Something I’m Not Ready To Tell Anyone I Know I Will Pay You Twenty Dollars. Needing the money, as Lavin tells us, she takes the bait and calls him. And thus begins this amazing adventure, a mixture of the highly unlikely and totally plausible.
Story, aside the joy of You Will Get Sick is in watching the actors, obviously enjoying themselves immensely without losing a beat, negotiating the play’s fast-changing scenarios, many of which come as a total surprise.
I mean, who would have expected Lavin, always mesmerizingly watch-worthy, to take on the job, for money, as the seriously ailing Isaac’s caretaker? And even more surprising, who could have guessed that Lavin’s greatest dream in life, one that she auditions for in this play, is to inhabit the role of Dorothy in the play, The Wizard of Oz?
Though You Will Get Sick, with a number of heartfelt tears carried in its wake, and surreal to boot, its view on the nature of sickness, one’s need for caring, companionship, support and understanding, in short, the fragility life and our own mortality, is a universal poem long passed on from generation to generation.
