Theater review by Ethlie Ann Vare
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 8/31/25 – Who would you be if you couldn’t remember who you are? That’s the existential question haunting Just Another Day, a new play written by and co-starring veteran character actor Dan Lauria. (You remember him as the dad in The Wonder Years, but he’s been around way longer than that.) He and Patty McCormack—who was nominated for an Oscar in 1956 (yes, really)—play a couple who are maybe longtime married, or maybe old writing partners, or maybe came to be friends in a memory care facility. We can’t be sure, because they can’t be sure. They remember the supporting cast of every screwball comedy from 1941, but they don’t know if they slept together last night.
Lauria says he wanted to write about aging and memory loss that wasn’t another tearjerker about families coping with dementia. There may be a tear or two jerked in Just Another Day, but there are plenty of laughs as well. No old people were condescended to in the making of this production: Lauria is 78, McCormack is 80, director Eric Krebs is 81, and even the composer of the original theme song—Air Supply’s Lord Graham Russell—is 75. (Russell wrote the song overnight after Lauria sent him a copy of the play.)
“When I started this, I looked into production grants,” Lauria explained after the sold-out Los Angeles opening night. “Every grant for new playwrights has one word in the title: Young. There were no grants for 75-year-old new playwrights.” So he and his wife sold their Los Angeles home and put on a show. After this run at the Odyssey, the production heads to Ireland for a series of performances at Trinity College benefiting Alzheimer’s research.
The concept and staging here are deceptively simple. First comes the title song, playing over a series of black-and-white stills of classic Hollywood pairs. (And if Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday don’t make you smile, you may not be the right demographic for this show.) Then two people approach a park bench, a tree stump, and a streetlamp. The Man and the Woman (they have no names; perhaps they’ve forgotten them) meet each day for we don’t know how many years. Each day, they must reinvent themselves, because they don’t remember if or how they know each other.
As the Woman asks, “How would we know if we forgot anything?”
But one thing outlives memory: the creative spirit. One day he’s a painter and she’s a poet. Another day he’s a stand-up comic and she’s his joke writer. Or maybe she was a nightclub singer? Whatever they once were, they were artists. So, you get some old jokes, some passable poetry, and a fun, if entirely tangential, Mel Brooks/Carl Reiner–style routine about God’s special-effects man, Vito Balducci. There’s a fight. There’s a song. There’s a kiss. Nothing really happens, which is kind of the point. Memory fades: life persists.
With a combined 120 years of acting experience, Lauria and McCormack know how to command a stage. The audience (we spotted Wendie Malick, Alley Mills, Gary Cole, and Jean Smart in the crowd) gave the 105-minute show a standing ovation. The Odyssey is a comfortable and storied local theatre, founded in 1969 by Ron Sossi, who remained at its helm for 56 years until his death this past March at age 85.
In this youth-obsessed town, it’s a pleasant change to see a play by, about, and for people who remember what they were doing when John F. Kennedy was shot.
Written by Dan Lauria
Starring Dan Lauria and Patty McCormack
Directed by Eric Krebs
Original Music by Graham Russell
Original Scenic Design by Christopher Swader and Justin Swader
Produced by Beth Hogan
Odyssey Theatre Ensemble
2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90025
Through Sept. 28: Fridays & Saturdays at 8 p.m.; Sundays at 2 p.m.
Additional performances: Wednesday, Sept. 17 and Sept. 24 at 8 p.m.
www.odysseytheatre.com
