Though it’s perfectly entertaining, with crowd-pleasing performances from Tracy-Ann Oberman and New York theatre stalwart Jennifer Westfeldt, I can’t quite see the relevance Richard Greenberg’s American play has to London today. It’s a serio-comic snapshot of a middle-class Jewish family celebrating Christmas in a palatial, rent-controlled, upper West Side apartment in 1980: and then again, much reduced and depleted, in 2000.
It’s not about Aids, which claims one character, and it’s only tangentially about the golden era of cheap Manhattan living. It's not really about the horror these lifelong Democrats feel at the elections of Ronald Reagan and George W Bush or a prescient warning of Republican horrors to come. (Greenberg, who died earlier this year, wrote it during Barack Obama’s second term in 2013.)
It is, I suppose, a wannabe-Chekhovian portrait of a charming but deeply flawed and dysfunctional family seen through the adoring eyes of an outsider. Our proxy is Jeff (Sam Marks), who’s joined his college friend Scotty for the holidays. Scotty (Alexander Marks, making a confident stage debut) is a languid golden boy, on whom his parents pin shaky hopes of greatness.
His dad Ben (Daniel Abelson) is a wide-lapelled wheeler-dealer, his mom Julie (Westfeldt) a former small-time movie star, now fey and wispy but with a talent for decorously skewering speeches that sound like they belong in a Restoration comedy. Scotty, she fears, might “whimsically elope” with his stunning but erratic girlfriend “some evening for lack of a conflicting appointment”.
The energy levels ramp up with the arrival of Ben’s sister Faye (Oberman), a smart-aleck broad with Bette Midler hair and great comic timing, lumbered with a bullet-headed husband who knocked her up on a first date with their awful, socially inept daughter. There are old and new hostilities in play beneath the badinage and even a bit of inter-family blackmail, but Jeff is dazzled. Phoning his own awful mother, he tells her the apartment is “like the sets of those plays you love, with the breezy dialogue”.
That line is a hostage to fortune, if ever I’ve heard one. Yes, Greenberg neatly roots the play in period with references to Women’s Lib, 80s heartthrob Armand Assante and “President Trudeau” (that’s Justin’s dad, Pierre). The dialogue has snap and sass. Water is “a garnish” for a dry-swallowed Valium, according to Faye. “I’m not mocking you,” Julie lovingly tells Scotty. “I’m *dismissing* you!”. But is this crew really so scintillating that Jeff would stay loyal to them, at the expense of his own private life, for 20 years? No, not really.
Spoiler alert: in the second half most of the men have died, and impoverished widow Julie is turning out a five-course Yuletide meal for three people, hopefully four (actually six) in the now-dilapidated and leaky apartment, around which property vultures are circling. Greenberg explores the legacy of poison handed down from mothers to daughters and it becomes clear that naïve, sweet but sharp Julie, the mother of feckless sons, is the play’s heroine, to be protected and cherished.
Full disclosure: I know Oberman slightly, but the evening belongs to her and Westfeldt, even if the latter seems not just to be in another play but another world entirely. They’re a great double-act, more yin-and-yang sisters than sisters-in-law. The rest of the cast do all they can with characters that have little interior life or backstory. On old-fashioned sets adorned with Christmas trees – yes, it does come earlier every year – one character has to keep reminding his fellow family members that “we’re Jews”. I mean, who does that?
Blanche McIntyre directs with technical aplomb and surface polish: the cued-up laughs land big. Previous productions of Greenberg’s plays in London - Three Days of Rain, The Dazzle and his adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s – highlighted the difference in tone and taste between the world’s two great theatre cities. This one from 2013 is enjoyable enough, but in a venue supposedly dedicated to new writing you have to ask: why this, why here, why now?
To 22 Nov, hampsteadtheatre.com.
