Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer and Rhea Perlman in Let’s Call Her Patty. Photo: Jeremy Daniel

From the beginning of Zarina Shea’s Let’s Call Her Patty, LCT3’s summer offering, it’s clear that Patty hovers in the realm of archetype; she’s introduced not with “Meet Patty” or even “Call me Patty,” but with her name as a convenience; it’s her descriptors that matter: “Let’s call her Patty.” But as the play goes on, the archetype quickly collapses into stereotype, and the more we know about “Patty,” the more she seems like a collection of traits that range from more-or-less-benign to more-or-less awful, not adding up to anything other than Overbearing Mother. Somehow, the more detail Shea layers in, the more the narrator spotlights Patty’s rules for life, the less we are able to perceive a person underneath the description. (Even the space seems depersonalized, defined by a few elements on Kristen Robinson’s set: a big flower arrangement, one Monet poster, against beige walls and beige carpet.)

So, Patty: Upper West Sider. Jewish matron of a certain age, where her kids are adults, she’s not a grandmother (“yet,” I can hear my own Jewish grandmother saying), and few obligations fill her days. Raised in Brooklyn, but raised her own child in Manhattan. Too old for shorts or long hair, in her own estimation, but too young to move to Arizona. (Though it’s also more than likely that Patty and her never seen and largely incidental husband, Hal, are never leaving NYC.) Preparer of gourmet meals for her dog. Still paying her twenty-eight-year-old daughter’s rent, and gripped by panic when said daughter, Cecile, doesn’t respond to every text within five minutes (again, so far, so familiar).

You can hinge a play on a flawed and frustrating character, but there’s basically nothing but Patty in this play. And her journey, such as it is, is little more than a tiny step toward having her confidence in the certainties of her world dented (turns out a nice rich Jewish girl can get addicted to drugs just like anyone else). The POV and narrative voice ostensibly belong to Patty’s niece, Sammy, and the engine of the plot ostensibly to Patty’s daughter, Cecile, a sculptor whose growing success in the art world is accompanied by a growing drug addiction. But Patty, in Rhea Perlman’s enveloping performance, takes up all the air in the room. (Sometimes it feels like Perlman’s choices are dictated by needing to find a pause in a waterfall of words just so she can breathe.) Shea does put some structural elements into Sammy’s narration that contextualize Patty’s world, to get us, if not always her, to see beyond the borders of her own timeline and her own mind for a second, but the gravitational pull of her narcissism and her anxiety overwhelms everything else. (Those attempts sweep from the Lenapes through the Dutch to the drowning of NY by climate apocalypse with a brief stopover at the previous and future owners of Patty’s coop.)

Patty raised Sammy after Sammy’s mother died, and the two remain close. For all that Sammy is guiding the narrative, the main feature of her character that comes into play here is that she spends a lot of time catering to her aunt. Sammy has a wife (unseen), a dying mother in law in Arizona (likewise not in the play), and a bit of a wild past, but there’s no sense of how she spends her days: Does she have a job? Where do she and Kelly live? How’s her relationship with her uncle? She seems to play a big sister role with Patty’s daughter, Cecile, but they only really have one scene together. (Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer gives Sammy warmth and a great deal of rueful affection for Patty, but Sammy never rises to the level of an adequate counterweight to Patty.)  Patty’s routine, on the other hand, is filled in with precision—her Pilates and spin classes, her preferred shops, her “relationships” with the service people who surround her (her hairdresser, manicurist, Pilates teacher, barista, etc)–because the main thing about Patty is without an audience, she barely exists. She likes the people around her, and she seems to be able to talk to anyone–-but she also seems desperate not to be alone. There’s pathos in this struggle, for sure, but don’t try to tell Patty that.

Patty’s daughter, Cecile, just plain barely exists. She’s a sculptor who’s just had her first wildly successful solo show, but the main things we learn about her are that her mom’s still paying her rent, and she tends not to eat or sleep enough. Whether her codependent fragility led to her drug habit or the other way around, there’s no there there. She’s a shell in search of a higher power. Director Margot Bordelon maximizes the weightlessness of Cecile in her staging, keeping her off on the margins, in a chair that she brings on and offstage herself; for most of the play, she’s got no physical presence at all. Arielle Goldman contorts her limbs in a chair like she’s trying to climb inside herself, but Cecile’s main presence is her absence, her inability to find the core of herself.

There might be a play in the story of how Sammy managed to break free(r) of Patty’s influence than Cecile did, or of how Cecile eventually comes into her own, or fails to; of how Sammy and Cecile see this towering figure in their lives. But Let’s Call Her Patty isn’t it. It’s all Patty, all the time, and that’s both too much and too little.