A wealthy white family gathers at their holiday home for a weekend of food, sun, scotch and Scrabble. What could go wrong? Almost everything, of course – predictably and precisely.
Less a new play than a potpourri of commonly occurring tropes and types, Melissa Ross’s Of Good Stock, at Manhattan Theater Club, assembles the three Stockton sisters, daughters of a famous novelist, at the family’s Cape Cod cottage for the birthday party of the eldest, Jess (Jennifer Mudge). Level-headed Jess is there with her husband, Fred (Kelly AuCoin), a food writer. Clingy middle sister Amy (Alicia Silverstone) brings her fiance, Josh (Greg Keller). And commitment-shy baby sister Celia (Heather Lind) shows up with a new bearded boyfriend, Hunter (Nate Miller).
“I don’t want presents,” Jess says. “I just wanted my sisters here for the weekend. I wanted us all to be together.” Considering the fraught family dynamics, she probably should have gone with the presents.
Ross’s play checks off all the classical unities – time, place, action – and catalogues plenty of contemporary jokes – artisanal pickles, destination weddings. There’s Chekhov here and maybe some O’Neill, too. Definitely Wasserstein and Henley and AR Gurney. There’s some comedy, some tragedy, a Bloody Mary recipe, and more than a little of the well-made play. Everyone has problems, everyone has secrets and there’s a backstory that gets shared out in vexingly tiny morsels, like so many passed hors d’oeuvres that don’t quite add up to a meal.
Ross has been receiving fine reviews for Nice Girl, a downbeat study of lower middle-class lives that just played the Labyrinth Theater. Of Good Stock, which had its debut at California’s South Coast Repertory, was drafted as a late-season replacement for a canceled Richard Greenberg play. (Come to think of it, there’s some Greenberg here, too.) If Of Good Stock lacks originality, there are still things to recommend it – the naturalistic dialogue, the chewy roles for actors. But there’s also much that seems clumsy, particularly in the repetitive structure and the abrupt ending. Lynne Meadow’s overheated direction, which treats each small squabble like a catastrophe, doesn’t help. And neither does the oddly suburban setting, less a retreat for generations of a wealthy family than an advertisement for a Pottery Barn outlet.
The acting is respectable, though it would improve if Meadow encouraged her cast to do less, particularly Silverstone, in the most caricatured of the parts. (It’s no surprise that AuCoin fares best in the role that demands the least.) A more naturalistic, less frenetic approach might ground the situations and make the play seem less familiar and less complacent in its narrowness and its concerns. As it stands, Of Good Stock yields a fairly low rate of return.
