In a gig economy where you can hire someone to deliver your groceries or mount a TV, why not simply hire people to do the emotional heavy lifting for you? All the better if you can get Tony-winner Linda Lavin, grumbling at you over the phone as you tell her you’ve developed a mysterious sickness and soon, probably, will die. You get a bit of human connection. She gets 20 bucks, though she wants 40, the sum you originally advertised and then crossed out on your flyer.
Such is the premise of You Will Get Sick, starring Lavin alongside Daniel K. Isaac as the young man (the script refers to him as simply “1â€) who hires her to unburden his woes. They make for a sweetly weird couple in the lonely grayness of the Big City. After the initial fumbling conversation about his disease, their economic relationship snowballs into something more tender — though Lavin’s character, Callan (though the script calls her “2â€), is always sure to ask for a little more money or an extra favor along the way. He hires her to tell his sister about his sickness, and in exchange, she drags him to her acting class. They ride a seesaw of obligations, approaching a sort of equilibrium.
This production of You Will Get Sick is the New York debut of the playwright Noah Diaz, though he wrote it in 2018, and it was originally supposed to be performed as his thesis at Yale Drama School in spring 2020. The cause of that interruption, COVID-19, stalks the corners of the play — the possibility of losing control of one’s body all the more present in the minds of the audience — though Diaz has wisely not rewritten the text to incorporate pandemic-era specifics. The terms of Isaac’s character’s disease are instead metaphorical, even fantastical. He can’t seem to move his limbs properly, and bits of straw — as in dry grass — keep appearing on his body. Diaz is working in the mode of Sarah Ruhl, one of his instructors at Yale and his idol, getting at contemporary anxieties by way of absurdity. Lavin and Isaac move through a world that is ours, but not quite. For instance, side characters keep offering them insurance in case a bird snatches them up into the sky.
The bird bit is funny, but the layers of surreality Diaz throws into the mix start to obscure the finer details of the characters’ dynamic, especially in the play’s final half-hour, as the disease advances and becomes even more abstract. There, the production itself also tends to overemphasize the bizarre, and runs away from itself. The Roundabout has given You Will Get Sick a plum team: Sam Pinkleton, choreographer of Significant Other and Natasha & Pierre is directing, and the chicly ominous scenic design is by the collective Dots (of the recent one-woman show of the moment Kate). Their work can add too much of a snazzy sheen, where the script may be better served by a smaller, loser approach. Pinkleton finds inventive ways to stage Isaac’s physical deterioration, and there’s a winning moment when Lavin and Isaac express their needs to each other in her movement class. But whizbang theatrics overwhelm later on: Blackouts and a bravura set change come across as overliteral. Diaz includes a voiceover in his script, which provides some of Isaac’s character’s thoughts in scenes where he is especially disassociated from his body and then leads to revelation later on. Often, though, you feel as if the narration is information that Isaac himself could communicate with a glance at the audience.
Almost in spite of those gestures, you want the play to stay with the people, since Isaac and Lavin are such a charming pair at a human scale. Lavin can make a joke out of a single inhalation, which turns out to be a good match for his more recessive sarcasm. He gives her space to ham it up a bit, and then snaps back with a quip. Her character has ridiculous dreams of starring as Dorothy in a community-theater production of The Wizard of Oz (“Did this Dorothy see the trials of war and age 60 years?†he asks). But Lavin sells that small ambition with such conviction that you start rooting for her to be cast, even as she croaks through trying to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.†That’s the kind of thing that entangles him with her, and you with both of them, no matter how much the relationship seems transactional.
You Will Get Sick is at the Laura Pels Theater through December 11.