In “The Madrid,” Edie Falco is Martha, a woman who abruptly leaves her job and family, and disappears. In other words, the star whose name is selling tickets plays someone who, technically speaking, isn’t there.
Martha’s a kindergarten teacher with a kind husband, John (John Ellison Conlee), and a 22-year-old daughter, Sarah (Phoebe Strole). The show opens in Martha’s classroom. At the end of that short scene, she’s done with it all. No explanation, no nothing. She just drops everything and everybody, and moves into the dingy apartment building of the title.
Under the light hand of Leigh Silverman (“Chinglish”), Martha is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. The part isn’t an obvious stage vehicle, especially for an established name like Falco.
Yet as cryptic and undemonstrative as Martha is, you can also see what drew the actress to this appealing new play by Liz Flahive, a producer on Falco’s “Nurse Jackie.” Her character deserts family, friends and job, but she turns out to be a catalyst who changes those around her, especially her daughter.
In fact Sarah, who’s in almost every scene, is the real lead of “The Madrid.” The petite Strole has a brisk warmth as a recent college graduate who must do some growing up.
Overcoming her initial anger, Sarah hangs out with her mother on the sly, as if they were having an affair. Dad John doesn’t know what’s going on, and neither do the concerned neighbors, Danny and Becca. Christopher Evan Welch sensitively evokes Danny’s needy-bordering-on-creepy loneliness, while Heidi Schreck neatly captures Becca’s overbearing yuppie angst.
You can’t blame Sarah for being frustrated with Martha, but you also understand her eventual acceptance of her mother’s decision — captured in a heartbreaking joint rendition of the old Billy Rose/Lee David nugget “Tonight You Belong to Me.”
While the show is often very funny, the laughs come from understated moments. We don’t get one-liners so much as examples of poor communication attempts between people who have no clue about each other.
Accepting a birthday present from her mom, a dumbfounded Sarah can only muster, “Oh . . . wow. I didn’t know Shania Twain had her own fragrance.”
In this crisis, Sarah has to step up. She helps her father organize a yard sale of Martha’s stuff, and goes shopping with her grandmother (Frances Sternhagen), who may be developing Alzheimer’s and is definitely cantankerous.
“She said she wanted new clothes,” the plain-spoken Sarah says, “but I think she just wanted to make a saleslady feel bad.”
As much as we grow to care for Martha, where she ends up is almost irrelevant: Somehow, we know Sarah will be OK.