Let’s Call Her Patty by Zarina Shea

Starring Arielle Goldman, Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer and Rhea Perlman

Scenic Design by Kristen Robinson

Costume Design by Sarafina Bush

Lighting Design by Oliver Wason

Sound Design by Sinan Refik Zafar

Production Stage Manager: Kaitlin Leigh Marsh

Assistant Director: Haley DeMar

All photos taken by Jeremy Daniel for the 2022 production

Patty (Rhea Perlman) is an Upper West Sider of more than moderate means who’s lived according to self-prescribed rules and routines: lots of exercise and very few calories. When her daughter Cecile (Arielle Goldman) experiences sudden whirlwind success as a sculptor and turns to cocaine to help cope, Patty, with help from her overextended niece Sammy (Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer), must navigate challenges that push her well outside her carefully curated comfort zone. LET’S CALL HER PATTY is a comedy about what it means to be a mother, a daughter, or anyone in the world doing their best to disentangle life’s mess.

PRESS:

“An extremely poignant play, “Let’s Call Her Patty” was directed brilliantly by Margot Bordelon.”

- Linda Armstrong, Amsterdam News

“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.”

- Loren Noveck, Exeunt NYC

“For older females, upper middle-class life, even when coated with a veneer of happiness, creature comforts, and respectability, is not always all it’s cracked up to be. Playwright Zarina Shea’s Let’s Call Her Patty focuses on this milieu via an Upper West Side woman, flanked by her daughter and niece. Margot Bordelon’s direction reflects first the comic, then the tragic aspects of such a life… Bordelon has, by means of Patty’s repetitive, nearly obsessive chopping, underscored an anger that belies the contented-matron persona.

- Rachel S. Kovacs, offoffonline

“Margot Bordelon's direction and Kristen Robinson's set design give the play a dreamlike quality that is in keeping with a work about memories, unbidden thoughts, and random ideas.”

- Howard Miller , Talkin Broadway