This one was a very split decision. The Lovely Bride really liked it. Me? Not so much. So let's discuss.
Here's what happens on the stage. Three grown children return to the ancestral manse, an Arkansas plantation that had been in the family for generations. The father, a respected judge, returned there twenty years ago with the goal of turning it into a B&B, but that never happened, and it turned into a hoarders paradise of his old stuff. Dad died, and all the kids return to the house with their families. And among the hoard they discover their father left a secret legacy - a photo album of graphic lynchings of African-Americans.
This sort of discovery is a challenge to a family, and none of the three kids are particularly capable of handling it. Eldest son Bo (Tim Gouran), has been living in New York forever with his wife and two kids. Toni (Jen Taylor), the only daughter, was left with raising the youngest, Frank (Billy Finn), and caretaking dad in his decline - she's now divorced, unemployed, and on the outs with her teenage son. Frank fell into addiction and fled the region after a terrible crime, and has not been heard from in a decade. At the outset of the play, Frank breaks into the house with his fiancé, a young new-agey Portlandite named River (Sophie Kelly-Hedrick). Both sons have come home for their own reasons - Bo wants to settle the family fortune and move on. Frank has been twelve-stepping his recovery and seeks forgiveness from those he offended.
But Toni is at the heart of all this - abandoned, divorced and unemployed, she's badly broken, and as a result lashes out at everyone and everything, hurting others before she can get hurt. Getting in the first punch. Relationships are to be confrontations, words are to be weaponized, and old wounds need to bleed anew. She's a very nasty piece of work, but the play gets deeply into why she's that way. Bo and Frank, regardless of their intentions, are little better. They are all, in the words of Bo's increasingly frantic wife, Rachel (Angela DiMarco), "assholes".
And, spoilers? None of them are going to get what they want. Things start bad and get worse. No redemption is offered, no lessons are learned.
This is the sort of play that I should like. All of the actors are local and have shown up in other shows. They're good. It's a full three-act play. It had a good-sized cast. The direction takes full advantage of the expansive, multi-level stage. It won awards from the learned critics. But here's the thing:
The characters are not particularly sympathetic - Toni is all thorns and elbows from the get-go, arguing about small matters (like who gets to sleep where) and throwing conversational bombs as she escalates. She starts at 11 and just goes upwards from there. The LB has known a lot of women like Toni, and strongly engaged with the character. I was more put off. The squabbling is continual, and as a result I was spending several hours watching a dysfunctional family face a crisis and failing utterly. I can understand where all the characters are coming from, and in fact each one gets an extensive monolog where they are trying to tie their personal situation into larger issues. But I don't feel much empathy with them, nor do I take any enjoyment from their travails and failures.
There are humous bits here to try to take the edge off. The LB laughed at a number of spots, but I found the humor to mostly cringe-worthy. Embarrassment humor is tough to pull off, and all the characters are guilty, but no one so much to have failed so badly. It feels like Tennessee Williams with cell phones, Edward Albee with the Internet, Eugene O'Neil on E-bay. Modernized but with the same core conflicts and no good way out. And I don't think it pulls it off, sadly.
The stage is impressive, piling the house with junk and old art staring down from the walls. Yet again, the denouement of the play is pure stagecraft, and feels overdone and excessive, dwarfing the human heartbreak that has come before. But on the positive side, the house feels like the remains of a life, a legacy that no one presents seems to know what to do with.
And with that half-hearted praise, this takes us to the end of the Rep's season. The Play that Goes Wrong and Come From Away were good touring companies with excellent production. Here There are Blueberries was the best and scariest of the season. Fancy Dancer and Mary Jane and The Heart Sellers were all smaller and all good for what they were saying. So I'm going to call it a good season and good collection of plays. Onwards and upwards.
And for me? More later.
