Joan Marcus
We are in a “Big City, a time before cell phones,” according to the program for Noah Diaz’s play You Will Get Sick (Laura Pels Theatre, to Dec. 11). Birds are murderous, the great peril above that the characters live in fear of. The city seems like a modern city, rather than a prehistoric one. People communicate by phone, and there are acting classes and hospitals. But there is also a deliberate air of unreality in this Roundabout Theatre Production, of people lost in places and time. The characters don’t have names, the phone lines that connect their conversations crackle. When they are together they speak a little obviously, at a variance, over each other.
The characters are known by numbers, and the central relationship is between #1 (Daniel Isaac) and #2 (Linda Lavin). #1 is suffering from some kind of illness or illnesses, which are gradually disabling him. Straw issues forth from his mouth and body when it is being exceptionally beaten up; the play focuses on what a body means, what it is, and what it is not.
#2 demands money from #1 to do the most basic tasks to care for him, and yet her care of him grows over time, even if she still demands the money that comes in crisp, always-available notes from his shirt pocket, like a bodily ATM.