Nicol-Blifford, Schuck, and Andersen.
New Haven Theater Company’s production of Cry It Out, by Molly Smith Metzler, is a finely tuned performance of a play about early motherhood that starts light and ends with surprising, affecting depth. It runs Feb. 23, 24, 29, and March 1, 8, and 9 at the company’s space inside EBM Vintage, 839 Chapel St.
Cry It Out centers on the relationship between Jessie (Jenny Schuck) and Lina (Deena Nicol-Blifford), two women who are recent mothers and happen to have adjoining backyards in a neighborhood in Port Washington, on Long Island. As both women are eager to make and keep not just a friend, but someone they can rely on, they quickly form a strong bond, meeting twice a day for coffee while their babies are napping. They have a classic chemistry — Lina is brash and hilarious, outgoing, oversharing, while Jessie is more reserved and steadier — that makes for good conversation, and together, they bring out the best in one another.
But there are differences between them, too. Jessie is a Ivy-educated lawyer, while Lina has an entry-level position at a nearby hospital. Jessie’s husband Nate works a lucrative white-collar job while Lina’s husband John works service gigs. Both are out on maternity leave, and Jessie wrestles with the decision of whether to return to her job or be a stay-at-home mother. It’s a choice Lina can’t afford to make; her growing family needs the money.
Schuck and Nicol-Blifford.
The first couple scenes play as a comedy about the foibles of early motherhood with undercurrents of class consciousness that give even the funniest, freest conversations some heft, and some edges. In the first third of Cry It Out, the play suggests that its major turn will hinge on what happens when the class divide between them becomes too great for either of them to ignore. But Metzler does something more clever than that.
One afternoon, just as Jessie and Lina’s friendship has really hit its stride, they are intruded upon by Mitchell (Ruben Ortiz), who is considerably wealthier — and considerably less sure of himself — than Jessie and Lina put together. Mitchell explains that he has seen Jessie and Lina together and wonders if they could make room in their friendship for his wife, Adrienne (Melissa Andersen), who, he says, is also a new mother looking for companionship. Could Adrienne join them? Over Lina’s objection, Jessie agrees. What follows both complicates and makes more subtle the class distinctions among all the characters. It also makes those tensions boil over, in unexpected, and in the end, deeply humane ways.
With Cry It Out, the New Haven Theater Company has once again leaned into its strengths, picking a shorter, tight play (it runs 90 minutes with no intermission), requiring just one set, with complex characters that the company’s actors can all sink their teeth into. Deena Nicol-Blifford utterly inhabits Lina. Every joke she makes — and there are a lot of them — lands, and later in the play, when Lina’s home life is tested, Nicol-Blifford makes her devastation palpable. Jenny Schuck’s Jessie has the longest road to travel and the most decisions to make, and Schuck shows us the emotions roiling beneath the surface even as she knows she has to keep her composure.
Ortiz does much with his supporting part, making Mitchell very sympathetic while also making room for his flaws. And as Adrienne, Melissa Andersen is able to do a character-development backflip that makes a profound point: She first makes her prickly character the kind of woman that people love to hate, and then turns on a dime to force the other characters (and the audience) to confront the reasons why we first loved to hate her.
As the babies grow and the decisions get harder, the play’s comedy deepens quickly into a sharp rumination on early motherhood, the near-impossible expectations placed on women, and the ways that the decisions every new mother has to make are in fact quite wrenching, no matter what their life circumstances are. We find, in the end, wells of deep sympathy for all the characters in the play. There are no right answers, but a sharp question about why early motherhood is so fraught. Does it have to be that way? Or, in the grind of struggling to make ends meet and thwarted ambitions, all playing out beneath a mountain of unasked-for advice, have we made it that way?
New Haven Theater Company’s Cry It Out runs Feb. 23, 24, 29, and Mar. 1, 8, and 9 at EBM Vintage, 839 Chapel St. Visit the theater’s website for tickets and more information.
