Sixteen characters are portrayed by the character of the narrator ----Constance Zaytoun---who carries the one-person play entitled A Good Day To Me Not To You now playing at the Arena Stage. The intimacy of the Arlene and Robert Kogod Cradle is perfectly geared towards the inward psychological thrust of this challenging play.
Actor Constance Zaytoun has an actor’s “field day” as she navigates the very real characters that inhabit her orbit---including several nuns, her brother-in-law, dental patients, her nephew and so forth. Ms. Zaytoun’s depthful insight into her character’s painful journey through life and her associations with those who affected her journey, help to ensure a captivating theatergoing experience. Ms. Zaytoun alternates her performance with myriad moods of raw honesty, humor, vulnerability, and cynicism to help this one -person show to come alive .
Playwright Lameece Issaq has written such a fearlessly authentic play that the eighty-five minutes of the play move with fierce urgency and spontaneity. Playwright Isaaq gleans every last ounce of emotion in her lines which evoke compassion, empathy, sarcasm , and bleak hilarity as she writes of her “Narrator’s” personal odyssey through life’s pitfalls and permutations. Playwright Isaaq tackles many facets of the life of the narrator, played so expertly by Constance Zaytoun, and the fourth wall of the stage is almost continually broken in order that the audience can be immersed very completely in identifying with the narrator character.
This play may be short in length, but it is not short on the observant and caustic eye of playwright Isaaq writing many characters for Ms. Zaytoun to inhabit. Ms. Zaytoun portrays a woman who has been hurt in life by the vagaries of hard economics, by a dental technician’s job that can prove intolerable, a barely tolerable rooming house that doubles as a nunnery, and the death of her beloved sister. Plodding through pain to create an authentic self seems to be a throughline of this play.
Director Lee Sunday Evans pulls the multiple levels and strands of this play together –one level of this play could be construed as an objective narration of the forces in reality that a sensitive person must conquer so that they can work to find a sense of meaning and authenticity. This play is an exploration of a woman who strives to give and respond to others, only to discover that she does not truly have a sense of herself and her own needs.
On another level, director Evans explores the playwright Lameece Issaq very thoroughly. Evans plunges into the text even further and there is a depth of acting and tone that borders on the masochistic rarely seen in many productions.
A third level of the show is the probing of the meaning of love and the importance of life events/markers that the marginalized among us often do not have (weddings, children, etc.) –the sensitive and marginalized must struggle on to find their authenticity. Amongst insensitive men and the curmudgeonly camaraderie of nuns in a convent/rooming house and the painful death of her sister , the character of the narrator (the marvelous Constance Zaytoun) tries to hold on to hope for the current and future stages of her life with her unabashed attachment to her nephew.
Lighting design by Mextly Couzin is highly functional and, concurrently, visually compelling.
Set design by Peiyi Wong successfully delineates a very commonplace convent/rooming house.
During the eighty-five minutes of this one-person play, Ms. Zaytoun skillfully dissects sixteen characters with skill. Sometimes the play is too painful to endure as it explores real life with such emotional acuity ---the play will most likely appeal to the most discriminating tastes.
One -person shows are a challenge and Ms. Constance Zaytoun, under the perceptive direction of Lee Sunday Evans, is more than up to meet this challenge. Playwright Lameece Isaaq has written a uniquely moving play that Arena Stage should be commended for presenting.
Running Time: 85 minutes with no intermission
A Good Day To Me Not To You runs through May 3, 2026, at the Arena Stage located at 1101 6th Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20024.
Photo credit: Constance Zaytoun in Arena Stage's production of A Good Day To Me Not To You. Photo by Daniel Rader.
Reader Reviews
Videos