ALL OF ME
The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through June 16, $31-$89
thenewgroup.org

Laura Winters’s All of Me is an endearing and moving romantic comedy about two young people who meet-cute at a hospital in Schenectady and explore a potential relationship that is impacted by family and financial issues.

Lucy (Madison Ferris) was a teenage jazz singer who is now considering going to college. Alfonso (Danny J. Gomez) works in data science and modeling and has just relocated from Manhattan to Schenectady. She has a dark sense of humor, always ready with a no-holds-barred joke, while he is a more serious and straightforward person. Lucy lives in a house that is slowly falling apart, with her overprotective, conservative mother, Connie (Kyra Sedgwick); her older sister, Jackie (Lily Mae Harrington); and Jackie’s fiancé, Moose (Brian Morabito), a slacker trying to earn money by playing online poker and via other random methods. Alfonso lives with his overprotective mother, Elena (Florencia Lozano), a defense lawyer, and his unseen father, an investment banker, in a fancy home with a maid and driver.

It’s not quite Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, or The Notebook, but it has an innate charm; it’s impossible not to root for these two attractive twentysomethings, despite all the impediments in their way.

Oh, and it just so happens that they both are in wheelchairs, communicating via text-to-speech technology that may be light-years beyond Stephen Hawking’s but still is perceptibly machine-created.

“What’s your favorite pre-set on your device?” Alfonso asks. The unpredictable Lucy replies, “‘Polly want a cracker!’ When I want to be disarming. And if some stranger is staring at me I use — ‘Hey dipshit, take a picture, it will last longer, and lasting longer is something your girlfriend told me you should work on.’ What’s yours?” The practical Alfonso answers, “It seems a bit lame now but — ‘To infinity and beyond.’”

Lucy had a potential career as a jazz singer cut short when she was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy six years earlier, at sixteen. She is unable to stand on her own and is losing her ability to speak and use her hands as the disease progresses. Alfonso was injured in an accident when he was six months old, is paralyzed from the waist down, and has limited use of his right hand. In real life, Ferris has muscular dystrophy, and Gomez was partially paralyzed in a mountain biking accident in 2016 that almost killed him.

While Alfonso has a support structure in place because of his parents’ wealth — they have a ritzy home specially outfitted for his needs, along with expensive art and furniture — daily existence for Lucy is more problematic. The wooden plank that allows her to get from one side of the house to the other is undependable, the dishwasher is broken, and Connie is working multiple jobs to make ends meet, doing nails at a salon and selling knives to housewives, receiving no help from her ex-husband, an opioid addict. Connie’s jobs fit her personality; she pretties up other women, then pulls out sharp weapons.

As older sister Jackie’s wedding approaches, the conflicts grow, including arguments about Lucy’s text-to-speech program. Connie is not happy with it, complaining, “Excuse me for missing the sound of my daughter’s actual, non-weird-robot voice.” Jackie is hoping that Lucy might be able to sing at the wedding. But Lucy, always quick with a joke, explains, “But I enjoy sounding like futuristic AI that waits until the end of the movie to lock you out of the spaceship.”

Winters (Coronation, Gonzo) is a young, energetic writer who documented the process of making All of Me on TikTok with an infectious enthusiasm that comes through in director Ashley Brooke Monroe’s (Julius Caesar, Tommy’s Girls) spirited production. Ferris (The Glass Menagerie,) is hilarious as Lucy, who refuses to wallow in self-pity but understands her situation all too well, while Gomez, in his theatrical debut, is tender and affable as Alfonso, who is at first shocked by Lucy’s boldness and pointed joking but comes to care for her.

@laurawinters12

Sedgwick (Twelfth Night, Ah, Wilderness!) makes a potent return to theater after an absence of more than two decades as the wine-drinking, cigarette-smoking mother whose life has not turned out as planned as she struggles to get by every day. Although she wants the best for her children, it has to be on her terms, not theirs. In her off-Broadway debut, Harrington sparkles as Jackie, sensitively portraying a sibling in a family dynamic that often makes her second fiddle to her sister, while Morabito (The Panic of ’29, Othello) is appropriately bedraggled as the ne’er-do-well, well-named Moose. Lozano (Brooklyn Laundry, One Wet Brain) is graceful as the fashionable Elena.

All of Me, a New Group production at the Pershing Square Signature Center through June 16, is a classic opposites attract rom-com and dysfunctional family drama, although the class difference gets overdone, emphasized by Brett Banakis and Edward T. Morris’s sets and Sarah LeFeber’s costumes. The show is reminiscent of Cost of Living, Martyna Majok’s 2022 Broadway transfer about a wealthy Harvard-Princeton man with cerebral palsy and a divorced quadriplegic woman, but that successful play bordered on becoming trauma porn, concentrating on the dangers of being disabled and feeling helpless. All of Me is much more focused on characters aiming to be independent.

The 1931 title song, written by Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons and performed by such jazz legends as Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Billie Holiday, contains the following lines: “All of me / Why not take all of me / Can’t you see / I’m no good without you / Take my lips / I want to lose them / Take my arms / I’ll never use them.” Those lyrics have never had such resonance as in Winters’s poignant and powerful play.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]