A FAMILY SAGA , A MEMORABLE AUNT
Bit early for an onstage Christmas-tree, but this comedy-drama by Richard Greenberg ran months on Broadway twelve years ago, and it suits a current run of plays about NY-Jewish family conflicts lit by domestic wit. It certainly has his trademark devastating lines, and in the age of Trump there is a wistful sense in it’s being set in two ‘elections of change”: Reagan in 1980 and the hanging-chad-chaos of 2000.
The political reflections, though, are slight. Ben and Julie do rather hope their son will be President one day, and magnificent Aunt Faye (Tracy-Ann Oberman, who steals every scene with scornful élan) is fond of saying that she is non-political while excoriating Reagan’s acting and delivering lines like“Republican Jews, what IS that? Like saying skinny fat people”. But lounging teenage Scott would rather be a teacher, likes kids and books and stuff, and the family is more preoccupied with its own matters. Like the impending death of Ben’s unseen old mother, who doesn’t appreciate any of them (“the sense of neglect is the last to go” observes Faye). Or the sullen refusal of cousin Shelley to communicate with anyone, least of all her mother Faye.
So on it goes, an elegant revolve evoking the startling vastness of an upper-west-side apartment, always larded with banging lines. Jennifer Westfeldt’s Julie is gushingly domestic, with an edge of slightly mad despair at it all, and first seen preparing an elaborate Christmas while Scott’s more sensible college friend Jeff helps chop things. Jeff, the outsider , is gloriously played by Sam Marks: a virtuoso one-sided phone call to his distant mother (humbler ‘first generation diaspora’ fussing about him showing himself up). Conversations between in-laws reveal the messy complexities of two marriages and the invisible old mother beyond: Oberman sparks fine laughs every few minutes with her splendid scorn, Westfeld’s Julie playing against her with seemingly naive contentment in a life where, as her sister in law tartly observes, you “never seen to have done anything on purpose”. There’s some plot-alert conversation about a ruby necklace. Which, as the first act ends, we begin devoutly to hope will cause some actual drama in the year-2000 section to come.
For it tends to feel too like a good sitcom or slow-moving soap – great lines, clear likeable characters , but little impetus. The strength of the characters, notably Jeff, Julie and Faye, has to hold us where storytelling doesn’t. The second half produces more memorable lines and a sense of weary years between. Scott has died, and his little brother Timmy is 24 (Alexander Marks entertainingly depicts the daffy college-dropout Timmy who really doesn’t want Christmas with Mum). Julie is widowed; Jeff, decent and prosperous, has remained an outsider-supporter of the family. Oberman’s terrific Faye is twenty years sharper, so depressed by Bush that she is “nostalgic for his father..whaddaway to start a century!”. She reminisces about the saltier politics of her older siblings fifty years earlier, who couldn’t even bear to pass a chicken plate across the Friday table if one was a Marxist and the other a Trotskyist. Her relationship with sullen daughter Shelley, now only featured shrieking anger on speakerphone, reaches a zenith at the sound of Shelley’s Latino partner with a moment of magnificent self-analysis: “I am not a prejudiced woman, but sometimes racial slurs come handy at moments of high emotion”.
See? It’s only the lines you remember, and a general sense of warmth in the muddle of family life. The plot does thicken financially towards the end, and there’s a warm emotional Christmas revelation to leave us feeling happy, no spoilers. So yes, it’s a quality piece, very Hampstead Theatre, and would be an irresistible novel. And Tracy-Ann Oberman is a national treasure But it is only just a play.
hampsteadtheatre.com. to 22 nov
Rating 3
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