Best Friends Forever?
Purva Bedi and Danielle Skraastad in The Lucky Ones, Lia Romeo’s play about the complexities of female friendship, directed by Katie Birenboim. Photo: Carl Bindman.
You could say the New York premiere of The Lucky Ones began with a spate of very bad luck.
First, there were multiple pandemic-related delays and postponements. Then, a last-minute funding issue. Finally (cherry on top!), COVID itself made a cameo in the cast during the first week of rehearsals.
Then again, what is luck? What is it really?
This is one of the central questions animating The Lucky Ones by Lia Romeo, now playing through November 9 at Theaterlab in a production directed by Katie Birenboim and produced by Boomerang Theatre Company. The play follows Vanessa (Purva Bedi) as she receives her own bit of Very Bad Luck in the play’s opening moments: a stage four cancer diagnosis. Shock, incredulity, and, less predictably, a lot of hilarity follows. Stuff about green juice, the kind with kale. Stuff about the incredible greenness of Vanessa’s doctor (David Carl), an acrobat-turned-oncologist, who’s been on the job for less than a week.
Luckily, her best friend of twenty years, Janie (Danielle Skraastad), is by her side for that conversation, and the health odyssey that follows. Taking inspiration from a 2017 Modern Love essay, the plot complicates when Vanessa encourages long-divorced Janie to re-enter the hellscape of online dating. Vanessa claims it’s so Janie can provide her with amusing anecdotes during chemo; the truth might be more complicated, and more benevolent—perhaps she wants a more assured future for her friend if her health deteriorates. But that compassionate impulse gets challenged when Janie actually meets someone on the apps, Vanessa gets sicker, and the possibilities for their lives dramatically diverge.
“I was thinking a lot about what role friendship has in our lives,” says Romeo, who wrote the play as part of the Brooklyn Generator project, which challenged its playwrights of the month to draft and put up a reading of a full-length play in less than thirty days. “Because I think a lot of times it does have a more enduring role than romance. I definitely have friends who have been in my life much longer than any romantic partner ever has.” Both she and director Birenboim yearn for more theatrical stories capable of holding the nuances and contradictions of female friendships, especially as they evolve over time.
“What is the line between admiration and jealousy?” asks Birenboim, pointing to some of the questions surfaced by Vanessa and Janie’s dynamic, and “what is the line between closeness and codependency?” She emphasizes how the play deviates from some of its siblings in the female friendship genre, which can often feel reductive: too “rah-rah sisterhood” on one side or “cat-fight enemies” on the other. Also novel, Birenboim says, is how The Lucky Ones centers unmarried women in “the middle time of life” without children, noting that many female actors she knows speak of reaching a certain age and suddenly only ever playing someone’s mother. But this dearth of representation also makes sense to her, given who’s most often produced: “There are a lot of theaters that kind of forget that women write plays, and that’s stunning to me in this day and age.”
You might say it was luck that brought Birenboim and Romeo together. After Birenboim directed another female-centric play, the well-received Nina by Forrest Malloy (also at Theaterlab earlier this year), the two Princeton grads ended up with the same agent, who set them up for a general meeting where they discovered a shared sensibility. The timing proved serendipitous: shortly after, when scheduling shifts left The Lucky Ones without a director at the eleventh hour, Romeo immediately thought of Birenboim.
The resulting collaboration is full of mutual admiration. “I love [Katie’s] instincts both with the text and with design and the visual world,” says Romeo. “It feels like we’re very much in tune in the rehearsal room.”
“There are a lot of theaters that kind of forget that women write plays, and that’s stunning to me in this day and age.”
“I adore working with Lia,” says Birenboim. “She is so precise, so specific with her language. I think a good relationship between playwright and director is so important and I’ve been so lucky.”
That sense of joy and luck seems to have pervaded the rehearsal room, despite the logistical challenges the production faced. Early in the process when we spoke, Birenboim described a lot of laughter; Romeo described it as her very favorite place to be. Surprising, perhaps, for a play that centers a life-threatening illness. Then again, Romeo, in a recent appearance on Birenboim’s podcast, Call Time, pithily described her work as “funny plays about sad things.”
Had the timing worked out differently, the sad thing at the center of The Lucky Ones might have prevented Romeo from joining rehearsals altogether. In the period between writing the play and this New York premiere, she herself was diagnosed with cancer (thankfully, at a much earlier stage than her protagonist) and went on her own treatment journey, which included a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery.
“There was one point where we thought it was going to go into rehearsal while I was still going through treatment,” Romeo says. She thought: “I don’t know how involved with this I’m going to be able to be right now.”
Luckily, things worked out. “I am at a good place, I’m not going through treatment. I feel good,” says Romeo. “So it feels like it is okay to be dealing with [cancer] in a fictional way.” Her recent health trials have also given Romeo insight into how essential her artistic practices are to her: “I have been writing since I was very young and it’s always been something that I have loved doing,” she says, “but it didn't feel like it was something that was literally saving my life until the past few years.”
Danielle Skraastad and David Carl in The Lucky Ones at Theaterlab. Photo: Carl Bindman.
The penultimate scene in The Lucky Ones features a final confrontation between Vanessa and Janie. Hurt and sick, Vanessa hurls language that it feels like there may be no coming back from. (Romeo says she turned up the heat on this exchange during rehearsals for an earlier production, inspired by an improv the actors did when a more subdued version wasn’t working.) After the fight, it’s unclear where the friends—or the play—can go. In another moment of life imitating art, Romeo found herself unable to find an ending for the play during her early writing days, with the upcoming Brooklyn Generator reading adding to the pressure. “I was stuck for four or five days,” she says. “I just did not know what the last scene should be.”
Finally, she decided to trust her subconscious, a habit that doesn’t come easily to the self-described intellectual processor. “I was like, I don’t know, let’s just try this. Maybe this is right.”
Without giving too much away, the ending breaks out of the preceding structure in a magical yet satisfying way, supplying a new answer to the question the play has been asking over and over again: What is luck? Who is lucky? Initially, the characters in The Lucky Ones suggest more obvious glosses: luck is health, luck is getting to live a long life, luck is facing a relatively small share of the slings and arrows that existence hurls our way.
By the end, though, that answer deepens and complicates itself. The lucky ones are those who get the chance to love—not necessarily in the ways that culture validates and valorizes, but in the quieter, sometimes messier, often sturdier ways.
Like the love between good friends. Like the love, despite all its obstacles and precarity, of still making theater together.