On any given day in, say, 1953, one could stroll to the theater district and see a solid, well-crafted drama such as Frank D. Gilroy’s Any Given Day. The show would doubtless be about a dysfunctional family, perhaps with one member dying of a protracted illness, another sleeping with another, and a dominant, stoic parent-figure presiding over all the misery. Audiences would then leave the theater depressed but braced by the author’s ability to craft something satisfying from such familiar material. Perhaps the play would be by Eugene O’Neill or Clifford Odets, or a hundred "Playhouse 90"-level artisans.
And it might go something like this: Living in the widowed Mrs. Benti’s house are her son, daughter, and grandson. Eddie (Peter Frechette) battles tuberculosis; Carmen (Andrea Marcovicci), abandoned by her husband, cares for her crippled, retarded son (Justin Kirk). The new man in Carmen’s life, Gus (Andrew Robinson), is a motor-mouthed but moral fellow of whom his brother-in-law-to-be says, “He keeps all his promises. Then again, he doesn’t promise much.” Said brother-in-law is sleeping with Carmen, though, which may explain the contemptuousness he shows his own wife (Lisa Eichhorn) and teenaged son (Gabriel Olds).
Be it 1953 or 1993, it’s no sin to write a good, old-fashioned play, even if it has elements that seem borrowed from the pens of other dramatists. If only fate’s relentless predetermination didn’t seal Gilroy’s world even more hermetically than Neil Simon’s nostalgic comedies, which, by contrast, have a sense of hope and “anything can happen” to them. Even the title, Any Given Day, misleads, because for these families, every given day is the same: the comfortable trappings of domestic gloom.
