Janie (Danielle Skraastad) and Vanessa (Purva Bedi) take a long look at their friendship in The Lucky Ones (photo by Hokun Tsou)
THE LUCKY ONES
TheaterLab
357 West Thirty-Sixth St., between Eighth & Ninth Aves., third floor
Wednesday – Sunday through November 9, $30
theaterlabnyc.com
www.boomerangtheatre.org
“I get a lot of satisfaction from measuring up to other people’s expectations,” playwright Lia Romeo explained last year. She also noted, “Being a woman in the world has always involved a certain measure of pain. . . . Being a woman in the world means there are no good choices a lot of the time.”
She wrote that in an April 2024 Newsweek Community Forum article, “Do I Reconstruct My Breasts? I’m Torn by My Decision,” but those sentiments are central to Romeo’s The Lucky Ones, her 2019 play now making its New York premiere at TheaterLab through November 9.
Staged by Boomerang Theatre Company in association with Project Y Theatre/Women in Theater Festival, the eighty-minute show offers an insightful look at female friendship in the face of tragedy. Vanessa (Purva Bedi) and Janie (Danielle Skraastad) have been besties for nearly twenty years, after meeting at an acting class. Now in their early forties, Janie is a childless, divorced middle school drama teacher with low self-esteem, while Vanessa is a steady working actress with lots of boyfriends and a fun-loving, devil-may-care spirit.
When a bumbling oncologist (David Carl, who plays all the male roles) tells Vanessa that she has stage four cancer, Janie appears to be more devastated than Vanessa. “I feel like I’m doing this badly. I’ve never done this before,” the doctor admits. Vanessa asks, “How long have you been an oncologist?” Counting backward on his fingers, the doctor answers, “Four days.” We soon learn he was previously an acrobat specializing in chair work, but an injury led him to this second career.
Calmly pointing out that she has lived a healthy life, Vanessa says, “So I guess I just don’t understand how something like this could happen.” A moment later, she uses a chair to climb up on the doctor’s desk to have a cigarette, blowing the smoke into the vent like she did in junior high. Vanessa asks Janie to join her; initially hesitant, Janie finally gets on the desk and takes a drag. It’s a potent scene that humorously sets up the seriousness that follows.
Confined to her hospital room, Vanessa quickly grows bored and decides that she will help Janie create an online dating profile and live vicariously through her, but Janie is reluctant to get back in the game, lugubriously claiming that men never ask her out “because nobody loves me and I’m going to die alone.”
Janie does at last find a botanist she swipes right on, but when she chooses a date with him instead of watching Bachelor in Paradise with Vanessa, cracks in the friendship start growing and get wider.
“It isn’t my fault that you’re sick and I’m not!” Janie argues. Vanessa replies, “No, it’s not! — But it should have been me! If one of us got to have their whole — I would have been better at it.”
David Carl, Danielle Skraastad, and Purva Bedi star in New York premiere of Lia Romeo’s The Lucky Ones at TheaterLab (photo by Hokun Tsou)
Directed with a mischievous bent by Katie Birenboim, The Lucky Ones unfolds on Ant Ma’s at times almost blindingly white set, consisting of movable chairs, a couch, a desk, and a cabinet that unfolds into a hospital bed. Just about the only color comes from flowers, pink bottles that match Vanessa’s intravenous fluid, and Jeff Croiter’s lighting, featuring three open rectangles of fluorescent bulbs. Brandon Bulls’s sound navigates through city noise, a screaming deejay, loud music, the voice of the universe (prerecorded by Christian Borle), and a wildly orchestrated meditation session. Stefanie Genda’s costumes help differentiate the unpredictable Vanessa from the more staid Janie. Romeo’s dialogue occasionally gets a bit stilted, but she is able to wiggle out of it with the actors’ help.
Carl (David and Katie Get Re-Married, Fat Cat Killers) imbues all the men with an innate goofiness and innocence despite the various characters’ complete lack of facility with women. Bedi (Dance Nation, India Pale Ale) and Skraastad (The Mound Builders, Hot Fudge) have instant chemistry as the two women who must rely on each other for love and care; when Janie says to the doctor about Vanessa, “If you’re in the room with her, you don’t want to look anywhere else,” that quote could apply to Bedi and Skraastad, who evocatively portray the friends.
Whether by choice or circumstance, the sexy, outgoing Vanessa and the more ordinary and plain Janie have no one else in their lives to turn to, even as painful truths come out. In the exhilarating finale, Brandi Carlile’s “The Story” blasts out, with the Grammy and Emmy winner singing, “All of these lines across my face / Tell you the story of who I am / So many stories of where I’ve been / And how I got to where I am / But these stories don’t mean anything / When you’ve got no one to tell them to, it’s true / I was made for you.”
Written for the Brooklyn Generator, The Lucky Ones is the fourth work in Boomerang’s nine-play “Super Season” celebrating the company’s twenty-fifth anniversary. In this case, Vanessa sums the show up well when she says, “Oh, yeah. People love a good cancer story. There are the sad ones full of chemo and radiation and surgical scars — but there are also some that are really fun.”
Oh, and beware the cobra lily.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]