Review: Amy and the Orphans by Ground Floor Theatre
by David Glen Robinson

 Amy and the Orphans is a depressing play. By intent. The dissolution of families, the bankruptcy of values, and an interesting watch glass study of adult failure to thrive—yet playwright Lindsey Ferrentino wraps a veneer of comedy around her serious themes. You in the audience are supposed to laugh, but you aren’t allowed to be happy. Oddly, that’s a good thing.

 

Ground Floor Theatre stages Amy and the Orphans in its excellent facility with its usual panache and high creativity. The cherry on top is executive artistic director Lisa Scheps’ hilarious curtain speech, a performance niche Scheps has spied out and consistently spins into gold. Director Maryanna Tollemache presents us with a near-unique qualification: she is autistic. And reveals this in her program bio. Her easy style and straightforward blocking convey anything but the dissociation of an anthropologist on Mars. Their work is very well done, despite confounding this reviewer with her parenthetically declared pronouns (they/she).

 

The play’s premise is the revealing of the physical and emotional odysseys of three grown siblings on the way to bury/cremate their deceased father and settle his minimal estate. The son, Jacob (Adam Donmoyer) and adult daughter Maggie (Cathie Sheridan) live continental distances apart, pursuing their careers. Their much younger sibling Amy (Sydney Weigand) lives in a home providing state-assisted nursing care, represented by Kathy (Giselle De La Rosa). Amy is differently abled to a degree in conjunction with Downs syndrome.

 

The action proceeds from a New York City airport (La Guardia?) out Long Island to Montauk at the northeastern tip of the island. That sounds a discordant note in the presentation, possibly intentional. Montauk is a zone of resorts and marinas, a weekend getaway destination for the denizens of the upscale Hamptons farther down the island, while the characters in Amy and the Orphans are decidedly lower middle class.

 

Class consciousness comes through like a hammer, largely in the spare set design by Frederick Demps, consisting primarily of large screens displaying video designer Lowell Bartholomee’s back-projected imagery. The imagery runs heavily to drab pictures—airport lounges, highway landscapes, fast-food restaurants, movie theatre lobbies, and exteriors and hallways of institutions. Much of the comedy runs to trashy stand-up repartee, including the unfortunate trend of the onstage vomit gag, a schtick I’d like to see disappear.

 

 

That is the main part of the plot, but the play begins with a scene later revealed to be a flashback. The couple Bobby and Sarah (Justin Smith and Meredith O’Brien) are shown at a weekend couples retreat at a local Holiday Inn. They’re engaged in a dialogue exercise. Not too much chemistry to these characters; their relationship is coming apart. The I hate you/I love you dialogues go back and forth for a while. In passing, they mention their third child. These two appear together in flashback scenes but we never see them with the other characters. For one such scene, the projected set shifts to exterior shots of a large institutional building. Ferrentino and Tollemache signal the audience with mimetic telegraphy, the dit-dot-dit of building suspense, but it’s no spoiler to reveal that Sarah and Bobby became the parents of Amy, Jacob, and Maggie in about the 1970s. In their fruitless struggle to save their marriage, they institutionalize special-needs Amy, a profoundly wrongful choice.

 

Skill levels varied in the cast of this well-rehearsed play, but the courageous actors held it together to the end. Script support for some characters was better for some than for others. Those out there on their own were reduced to arm waving and goggle-eyes at the audience to juice their punchlines.

 

 

One character needing no extras was Giselle De La Rosa’s Kathy. Kathy gave us streetwise potty mouth and lots of it in a generalized Hispanic accent dragged through the Bronx and plopped onto De La Rosa’s palate. As Amy’s state-appointed nurse, she was overdone, looking and acting about 14 months pregnant, brash but happy to have her unskilled state job after failing to make it as a hairstylist. Amy adores her and in a quiet little nasty subtext seems to have picked up plenty of Kathy’s billingsgate. That juiced the laughs very well.

 

Another standout was Meredith O’Brien, a favorite in this generation of actors, with her classic white-blonde looks, impeccable timing, and elocution. She was fresh from the role of Ma in Bottle Alley’s Trash Planet. Farther back, Earlier she absorbed the powerful role of Martha in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In that production she and her co-star Rick Smith consigned Taylor and Burton to the ash-heap of theatre and movie history.

 

Amy and the Orphans centered upon the differently abled Amy, and it came to life in the hands of the differently abled Sydney Weigand, who handled the role gently and well. Her bio recounts her activity in sports and disability activism; all who witnessed her in Amy and the Orphans hope to see her more often on stage in the theatre.

 

When we swim to the deep end of the story and learn that Amy, institutionalized in the infamous Willowbrook, was abused, we finally understand what a triumphant life she has created for herself simply by remaing alive. That existential joy is shaded for us by the knowledge that Amy’s story is not unique. We leave, perplexed that helping institutions often create much of the damage despite the best intentions. Yes, there are a few human monsters lurking in those places, but most of the blame for failures falls to restrictive policies, inept implementation, inadequate facilities, and insufficient resources.

 

Ground Floor Theatre’s dramaturgy shines brilliantly. It’s a story of disabilities all around; selecting the script, a differently abled director (Tollemache), and principal actor (Weigand) was in keeping with the theatre’s longstanding commitment to supporting underrepresented communities, however defined. Tollemache is a beneficiary of another building Ground Floor Theatre program, the Directors Rising Program, in which young directors of any level of experience and personal agency gain opportunities to direct. GFT deserves the loving support of the theatre community in return for the enlivening, sometimes leading-edge works of art it offers.

---

Amy and the Orphans
by Lindsey Ferrentino
Ground Floor Theatre

August 14 - 30, 2025

Ground Floor Theatre, Austin