Review: Maybe Tomorrow, Cries a Woman Living in Her Bathroom

The bathroom is my mother’s sanctuary. She spends hours there peering into the mirror, applying creams, and swishing water around in the sink. This was obviously a challenge when I was growing up in a house with four people and just one john. But her behavior now seems positively reasonable to me after viewing Max Mondi’s Maybe Tomorrow, which is making its off-Broadway premiere with Abingdon Theatre Company at A.R.T./New York Theatres.

The play is about Gail (Elizabeth A. Davis), a woman who lives in a deluxe trailer in Vermont with her husband, Ben (Dan Amboyer), and makes bead jewelry. She’s always thought of the bathroom as her “pause room,” a place to escape the pressures of the outside world. When she becomes pregnant and Ben gets a new job, they move the trailer to New Jersey and Gail finds herself spending so much time in the bathroom that she quietly moves in full time, while beading and running a successful Etsy store.

Cloistered away like a modern-day anchoress, Gail has but one window on the world. “Honey, you need to see the sky right now before the sun sets. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Ben tells her in a transparent attempt to coax her out. But with a few keystrokes and without ever looking up, she can see it too. And in the age of remote work and in-person fear, is she really that different from so many Americans?

For the sake of drama, Gail’s paranoia is on another level. Despite giving birth, she begins to believe that their son, Benji, is not real. After all, he never comes into the bathroom. She’s also convinced that an audience is watching her—which, of course, we are.

While Davis, a Tony nominee for Once, delivers an emotionally resonant performance, she never manages to connect with the audience in a way that would make this Truman Show conceit work. One can imagine a stand-up comedian in this role making direct eye contact and persisting through long pauses that would make us feel like accomplices in her skewed reality. But Davis is too timid in her approach, racing through the passages of direct address so we never really feel how real her delusions are to her.

Amboyer fares better, delivering a heart-wrenching performance as an inordinately patient man who spends years gently attempting to nudge his wife out of isolation. A scene in which she dozes on the toilet while he straps massagers to her legs to prevent her muscles from atrophying is among the most devastating scenes I’ve witnessed this season.

But amidst all this pathos, I couldn’t help wondering about one crucially unanswered question: Where are Gail’s husband and son defecating? I suppose there are trailers so deluxe as to have a second bathroom, but the way Gail describes this family (“poor”), it’s hard to believe they have one.

This is despite the lavish set design of Josafath Reynoso, who imagines Gail’s bathroom as something you might encounter in a showroom in the Flatiron district, complete with claw foot tub and faux-marble tiles. Golden bars surround the thrust stage, with upstage glass double doors providing the only entrance and exit. This is obviously not a realistic depiction of a trailer bathroom, but a representation of how the space feels to Gail—both a sanctuary and a cage, and larger than it really is.

In the balance between reality and delusion, director Chad Austin puts his thumb on the scale for the latter, with Dawn Chiang’s eerie lighting infiltrating every corner of the stage, including the grout between the tiles. The pink bathrobe Siena Zoë Allen has selected for Gail screams insane, while Amboyer executes a dizzying number of quick changes offstage, our only indication of the passage of time. It’s meant to be disorienting, to make us feel what it is like to exist inside Gail’s head, and it partially succeeds.

Despite the uneven execution, Maybe Tomorrow is a bracing dive into the deep end of mental illness in a time when rapid technological and social changes have made us all feel untethered. In such a dynamic environment, it’s natural to seek out a rest room.