Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

Erik Pearson ©2025  Ben Hollandsworth and Reyna de Courcy

Imagine if Tobias Wolff's memoirs became intertwined with a seedy ghost story and you'd somewhat approximate Christopher Wall's new play Dreams of the Washer King. A story of two single parent families torn apart by tragedy and rage, there's enough latent drama for at least three plays, which often means that it never really adds up to a satisfying single one.

Ryan (Ben Hollandsworth) is a nerdy teenager obsessed with Isaac Asimov and trying to communicate with his late father (not unlike the Jodie Foster flick Contact), retreating to his world of sci-fi whenever needed, and lives with his mother Claire (Carla Harting), whose odd behavior becomes more identifiable as the story unfolds; she is first seen literally crying into bread dough, nursing a wound we are not privy to right away. The parallel tale involves Wade (Stevie Ray Dallimore) and daughter Elsie (Reyna de Courcy), the former a brutish, tortured blue-collar worker, the latter his tomboyish offspring who has a love-hate relationship with him that we later learn is based in abuse of different forms. Ryan and Elsie become fast friends after discovering they are neighbors, and their parents begin an ill-fated courtship. And eventually, through certain surreal touches, a memory play forms before us.

Erik Pearson ©2025  Stevie Ray and Ben Hollandsworth

Wall's play suffers from a non-crystallized point of view, we have too many narrators at too many intervals, and given the personal nature of the story, it should have been much more affecting. But despite director Giovanna Sardelli's apt use of Cherry Lane's cozy Studio theater, too much of the play seems like window-dressing for the final reveals, which are not as harrowing as necessary to fully satisfy as drama.

The young players never seem quite innocent enough to pull off the delicate rhythms of teenage indifference-Hollandsworth in particular seems far too mature to play a small-town, dazed 15 year-old. The adult players fare somewhat better despite the opaque material: Dallimore is appropriately menacing yet believably conflicted as the dad wrestling with his demons (literally-in one silly aside), and Harting's strange yet endearing performance actually makes sense of Claire's inner struggles, and suggests backwoods desperation without putting too fine a point on it.

There are nice little details that pop up here and there (Claire makes Wade a Fluffernutter sandwich when they first meet, Ryan warmly brushes his mother's tussled hair before she heads to work), yet the proceedings are too self-consciously gothic to have true staying power. Dreams of the Washer King ends up a mountain of build-up to a molehill of true substance.