Did he or didn’t he? That’s the question lying at the heart of A Good Family, Marja-Lewis Ryan’s world-premiere one-act play at The Lounge Theater. Ryan, who won the 2014 L.A. Drama Critics Circle award for her family drama One in the Chamber,deals with another domestic scene in her new work, which is set in Fulton, Missouri on Christmas eve.
Sara and Matthew Sutton (Heidi Sulzman and John K. Linton, respectively), nice middle-class parents, are busy prepping for the big holiday, sipping punch and listening to carols on the radio as they trim the tree and fill the stockings. It’s all very warm and cozy, a scene right out of a Hallmark special, until their son Jack (Alec Frasier) shows up and drops a bomb: he’s just been charged with raping a girl in his college dorm. A Good Family then deals with the impact of this disclosure on the family, which also includes a young daughter Lacy (Kelli Anderson) and Sara’s sister Kerry (Lindsey Haun), a hard-boiled, cynical lawyer who is visiting from out of town. When Jack insists that he’s innocent, that the sex he had was consensual, the family tries to rally by his side. Problem is the police photos show a badly bruised victim, indicating that there was a violent struggle resulting in an apparent rape. The tearful Jack swears that the girl’s testimony is false, that he never got rough with her. The police seem to side with him, Kerry reports (having paid a visit to them), but it remains to be seen whether the district attorney will push for a trial. Meanwhile, the Suttons struggle to cope with the shock and trauma of Jack’s arrest. How could this happen to us? Sara and Matthew wonder. We’re good people, Jack was a seemingly normal, happy kid, what went wrong and why? The problem with A Good Family is that it doesn’t go beyond that point. We never learn whether Jack was guilty or not, and we never see the girl he supposedly forced himself on. Instead, author Ryan concentrates on the family’s response to the distressing news. That’s interesting but only up to a certain point: a deeper handling of Jack’s character is called for, a stronger investigation of the issues as well. Perhaps A Good Family should have been a longer, more complex play, because at 55 minutes, its power and importance seem not to have been fully tapped.
