Review: Exit Cuckoo at PlayMakers

By Emma Miller

“I’m a nanny—well, really I’m an actress,” Lisa Ramirez tells the audience. Actually, she is both, and in Exit Cuckoo (nanny in motherland), currently playing at PlayMakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, writer and performer Ramirez details her real-life immersion into the world of child caregiving after she moves from San Francisco to New York City to pursue her acting career.

Ramirez quickly discovers that she is emotionally and physically drained by her new day job, which brings her into contact with an unsettling world of immigrant women, who raise other women’s children. Her friend Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, urges Ramirez to write down the stories of the nannies and mothers she meets. The result is a funny, sad and moving one-woman show that explores issues of race, class, motherhood and the politics of domestic workers.

Rather than reducing the nannies to victims and the mothers to villains, Ramirez succeeds in presenting a more complex account by giving insight into the guilt and disappointment that plague both the nannies who need to work and the mothers who need their nannies. Even so, it is clear that Ramirez is highly sympathetic to the plight of the nanny above all else; for the past five years, she has been volunteering and working with Domestic Workers United.

Ramirez makes good use of a minimalistic set—select props nestled in the confines of a stroller, a single convertible costume and a variety of accents—in order to morph between settings and characters. It is easy to forget that she is just one actress as she embodies a range of personas, including an unhappy Upper East Side trophy wife, a guilt-ridden working mom, a disapproving grandmother and nannies from several different countries.

Although Ramirez transitions seamlessly between these parts, the accents she employs are sometimes inconsistent and several characters are portrayed as broad racial caricatures—a Latina nanny named Rosa peppers her speech with exclamations of “Ay, dios mio!” while an Irishwoman named Fiona continuously references “drinkin’ a pint.” Nevertheless, Exit Cuckoo cleverly interweaves its characters within this world of domestic work, and Ramirez wins the audience’s empathy as she explores her own relationship with her mother while growing passionate about the rights of domestic workers.

Despite a somewhat trite ending that encourages unity and togetherness,, Exit Cuckoo paints a darker and more nuanced portrayal of nannying than did the 2002 novel, “The Nanny Diaries,”—and certainly makes for an impressive and enjoyable production.

Exit Cuckoo will run at 7:30 p.m. with matinees at 2 p.m. through Jan. 16 in PlayMakers’ Kenan Theatre at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Tickets are available for purchase at www.playmakersrep.org.