Review: A Text-to-Speech Meet-Cute in ‘All of Me’

Lucy has impeccable comic timing and a sense of humor as dry as a gin martini. Her expression deadpan but for a slightly furrowed brow, she delivers punchlines with Amazon Prime efficiency in a calm, even tone that may sound familiar to people who use Alexa or ride the New York City subway.

Played with wry assurance by Madison Ferris, Lucy communicates using a text-to-speech tool built into her motorized scooter. As heroines go, she is a young Katharine Hepburn type: headstrong and outspoken but eagerly in search of tenderness. Her verve and vulnerability are the lifeblood of “All of Me,” an affecting if formulaic new romantic comedy by Laura Winters that opened on Tuesday at the Pershing Square Signature Center.

Lucy meets Alfonso (Danny J. Gomez), who uses a motorized wheelchair and similar technology to communicate, outside a hospital while awaiting their rides. Proposing a game, Lucy asks him to pick a random key on his screen; when he chooses “B,” there’s a prolonged pause while she types. Then her device’s flat staccato sounds out the raunchy rhymes of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.”

Typical of Lucy, it’s a funny bit with a mordant edge, bemoaning her situation by making light of it. As we soon learn, Lucy used to love to sing but has lost the ability to pronounce consonants (the play’s title refers to the jazz standard by Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons). Lucy received a diagnosis of muscular dystrophy when she was 16; now in her early 20s, she has been managing the disease long enough to laugh about it with a trace of cynicism.

Where Lucy sees only limitations, Alfonso, who has been paralyzed since infancy, maintains a broader sense of life’s possibilities — largely because he has the money to. So, what follows is a classic case of opposites attract. Lucy shares a cramped, less-than-accessible home with her mother, Connie (Kyra Sedgwick), who works two jobs; her older sister, Jackie (Lily Mae Harrington); and Jackie’s fiancé, Moose (Brian Furey Morabito).

Alfonso, on the other hand, is a white-collar professional with enough means to hire help and buy a tricked-out house (the furniture-swapping set is by Brett Banakis and Edward T. Morris); his mother, Elena (Florencia Lozano), is only in town to help with the move (the story takes place in Schenectady, N.Y. in 2018).