Reviewed by Leigh Kennicott February 05, 2003 One of Sam Shepard's trilogy of plays concerning that most hallowed and harrowing of institutions -- the family -- gets a thoughtful production by 3KO Broadway Theatre Company. Shepard's 20th century family -- husband, wife, and two kids, living on a farm in Southern California -- is the last vestige of American's agrarian heritage. The harsh reality of the patriarch's failures infects the rest. The playwright provides a chillingly realistic description of an alcoholic father who controls the lives of everyone around him. Even as they struggle to break free, they are drawn ever closer to the maelstrom. Shepard's writing allows an audience inside this experience through heavy use of metaphor and inner monologues, and a director's job is to blend these elements into a seamless mix of contemplations and action. David Jay Berry is mindful of this charge and generally successful. He has assembled actors who bear uncanny resemblances to one another: Daniel Tamm effectively plays the drunken patriarch, Stephen Ferguson manages to be insular and revealing at the same time, Carol Avery fits in as the mother, Christina Diaz is the sassy teenager. A series of slick operators preys on this family: Todd Patrick Breaugh is just charming enough, and Scott Brady recalls a scary Vegas hood in his depiction of the bar owner. John Schaffer and Erik Hill finish the job as two thugs, and Cybele O'Brien plays an overburdened patrol person. This production begins slowly. Ferguson's first monologue, set in an amorphous other-space, seems ponderous and unfocused. His concern about conveying the disconnection of this character works to the detriment of pace and energy. Avery too, as Ella, seems more tentative in her first scene. Tamm's early drunken behavior plays at odds with the precision of his speech. But the play and the actors gain momentum and cohesion as the play progresses. The uncredited setting mixes a real refrigerator, stove, and Formica table with contrived set pieces to accomplish the needs of the play. The also amorphous stage space surrounded by scatterings of seats on three sides thrusts us into the lives of Shepard's characters just as surely as if we were there. It is , in a few words, the triumph of theatre. |