IT MAY BE JUST ANOTHER DAY,
BUT THIS ISN’T JUST ANOTHER PLAY

If I were to start by telling you what author Dan Lauria’s sly new play is about, a great number of you might stop reading in disgust, thinking, “I’ve lived through that; I don’t need to see a play about it.” However, Just Another Day, now playing at Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, is a fresh, gentle, lighthearted take on a future that looms over us all. With sensitive direction by Eric Krebs and starring Lauria (Jack Arnold in The Wonder Years) and Patty McCormack (darling little Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed), this unassuming little production is a show to treasure.

An old man sits alone on a park bench. A smartly-dressed old woman joins him. The first thing he asks her: “Did I sleep with you last night?” Indignant, she responds with insults that he turns into jokes, and they soon fall into amiable, playful conversation. They create comedy routines and bond over their love of old movies. The only problem is, they don’t know who they are or what their pasts were like, yet they’re able to recall the most minor character actors from famous movies. She has an inexhaustible vocabulary of ten-dollar words, but he seems a bit more lost. We soon learn that this is not a park, but some kind of institution. They have dementia and are under the constant watch of some offstage orderly, who rings a bell whenever the two are about to show intense affection and emotion.

Lauria’s writing keeps us in the same fog as the characters, obstinately refusing to give us easy, satisfying answers to the questions that they constantly ask each other. Was she a poet? Was he a painter? Were they married? Though not explicitly stated in the play itself, Lauria says they were comedy writers. He gives us delightful routines done in the style of TV’s golden age, an era when comedians were comfortable telling off-color jokes, saying, “We never cut funny,” which itself feels like a gentle chastisement to the state of comedy today. After a while, we feel the constant presence of a never-seen orderly, and existential dread briefly, repeatedly, surfaces and retreats. It’s much like seeing a Samuel Beckett play, except, unlike Beckett, this goes down easily.

I don’t often get terribly excited by casting, but Lauria and McCormack are a clear-the-calendar pair. If the mere mention of McCormack makes you gasp in awe, you owe it to yourself to come. The ease with which they perform these finely detailed roles, whether her endearing snorting laugh, or his persistent loving patience, is awesome to see, especially in such an intimate theater and without microphones. Their comfort with each other is such that I completely believed that they could’ve been a pair like Betty Comden and Adolph Green or Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie from The Dick Van Dyke Show. Our increasing fondness for them makes it all the more painful when they land on flashes of lucidity, and devastating when we see them age. Yet, to everyone’s immense credit, the play never devolves into sappy sentimentality.

Tech specs are modest and largely stay out of the way. The frame of a CRT TV and silhouette of the city skyline dominate Pete Hickok’s set, never letting us forget the world that has passed us and now passes without us. Michael Blendermann’s lighting included a surprising bit involving the lamppost. Lord Graham Russell provided a nostalgic original song that played against video montages of photos from classic Hollywood movies, also designed by Lauria. The montages felt a little long, but they were effective in calming down the excited audience to match the quiet mood of the play.

Lauria wrote this play, in part, as an antidote to the stream of depressing plays about aging that invariably revolve around familial loss and doctors. Just Another Day shows that aging and dementia isn’t necessarily a living death. All we need to do is keep showing up, keep talking to each other, and keep creating.

photos by Kathy Portie and Russ Howland

Just Another Day
Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd
Fri and Sat at 8; Sun at 2; Wed at 8 (Sept. 17 & 24)
ends on September 28, 2025
for tickets ($20-$43), call 310.477.2055 ext. 2 or visit Odyssey Theatre
Wine Night Fridays: Enjoy complimentary wine and snacks
after the show on the third Friday of every month.