If there are skeletons to be found in a family, you can count on Richard Greenberg to exhume them. At least two, of his many excellent plays, Three Days of Rain, and Safe as Houses, are notable for their generation-bridging tremors and traumas. This time Greenberg shows a concern for the fate of a Lower East Side Manhattan Jewish family in the 1940s. If Greenberg makes their present and their future amusing to watch, he also keeps everything else about them obscure and strangely illusive. The story is hampered by not revealing anything that is either provocative or tantalizing. A cleverly glib, fast-paced and rather short first act introduces us to grim and grousing widow (Marsh Jean Kurtz); her two oldest and always squabbling married daughters, Sophie (Robin Bartlett) and Anna (Bebe Neuwirth); Jimmy (Kevin Isola), an unwelcome Gentile suitor, and Miri (Jennifer Carpenter) his sickly fiancee, the third and youngest sister. Sophie's husband Jack (Jeff Allin) is also present for a spell; he's a man of little words yet appreciative of Ma's food. Act II jumps fifty years to the present. Here we see the testy relationship of Anna's now grownup daughters Celia (Bartlett) and Nell (Neuwirth), evidently carrying on a family trait of bickering. It is on the night before Nell's daughter Laurel's (Carpenter) wedding that the connection that ties the long dead Aunt Miri's suitor Jimmy to Nell's lover Bee (Allin), who is also Laurel's naive fiance Ev's (Isola) father, is disclosed. (This is all not nearly as complex or convoluted in the unfolding.) But during the course of, and even at the end of, the play you may wonder why it all matters and why we should care.
Greenberg captures most effectively the spirit and flavor of Jewish home life in the opening scene. Kurtz, who also plays a waitress in Act II, is terrific as she redirects the hate she has for her husband toward Jimmy, just because he is a Gentile. Bartlett is effective as the more cynical Sophie in Act I and the more embittered and jaded Celia in Act II. More compliant yet sassy as Anna in Act I, Neuwirth is amusingly affected, as the well-heeled Nell, in Act II. Isola get points as the determined young suitor in Act I, whose plan is to take the ailing Miri (Jennifer Carpenter) with him to Orange County, California and get married. Jimmy has big plans to go into a pharmaceutical business partnership with (the unseen) Everett Beekin. While harboring no hate, the gently sparring Sophie and Anna are keen on exercising their doubts and their curiosity with this appealing goy.
There is a flip and funny side to the friendly war between Sophie, who has been unable to conceive and Anna who is three months pregnant and their belief that the bedridden Miri is not sick but avoiding them. Ma, whose idiosyncrasies include washing and drying all money that comes into her hands, gives her hands another workout when she physically assaults Jimmy in a rather farcical manner. The sisters do their best to be supportive of the firmly committed Jimmy. Yes, there is a touch of soap opera here, but only to the extent that the relationships are being tied together through events that have become vague and rather inconsequential with time. With interest, we follow the story hoping that it will all somehow make us care and possibly reconsider how the fickle finger of fate governs and determines our lives. Except for the excellent acting and Evan Yionoulis' savvy direction, the course seemed more than a little contrived and ultimately unsatisfying.
Set designer Christopher Barreca's 1940s kitchen has the cooked-in look, while his Pacific Ocean setting has a nicely abstracted, living-near-it look. Kudos to Teresa Snider-Stein's costumes that go from appropriately frumpy to fantastic.
