A good old-fashioned holiday train wreck always makes for a certain kind of comedy — but what, wondered English playwright Sam Holcroft, if everyone’s unconscious coping mechanisms were spelled out in advance, so we could see more of the mayhem coming?
That’s the running gag in “Rules for Living,” which assembles a titanically dysfunctional family for a Christmas luncheon that begins to fall apart well before everyone’s gathered by the tree: Handy explanatory titles, projected silent-movie-style high up on Round House Theatre’s broad proscenium stage, warn us that “Matthew must sit to tell a lie,” and so on. As the players proliferate, each with one nerve left for shredding, the rules of engagement grow ever more intricate, and the giggles multiply accordingly. For a while, that is, until the stakes get high enough to carry the laughs into hollow-echo territory.
The entangled parties — partner-track attorney Matthew (Will Conard), his struggling ex-athlete older brother Adam (Jonathan Feuer), Adam’s controlling dipsomaniac wife (Dina Thomas), and Matthew’s nervously peppy actor girlfriend (Dani Stoller) have plenty of intrafamily baggage to unpack already. And oh, by the way, the boys’ crusty old hanging judge of a dad (John Lescault) is just getting out of the hospital after a collapse that their prim and polished mom (Naomi Jacobson) can’t quite seem to explain. No surprise that the mood feels appropriately seasonal, which is to say fraught to the point of imminent explosion, by the time the matriarch notices how much the jangly girlfriend’s ill-formed candy-cane cookies resemble pink-frosted phalluses.
Ryan Rilette’s crisp and disciplined staging, which represents the play’s North American premiere, ratchets along nicely through the first act. Stoller demonstrates for the umpteenth time that she can navigate the loopiest authorial and directorial demands without seeming effort. Thomas warmly humanizes a character who could easily play as a shrewish punch line, while Conard and Feuer create that specifically fraternal blend of aggression and affection with enough intensity to make some of us (ahem) break out in brotherly hives.
Jacobson, a performer about whom I’m not entirely objective after 30 years of watching her slay audiences across the DMV, delivers a gloriously specific suite of uptight-lady tics and offended-perfectionist twitches that suggest a person compensating for a lifetime of chaotic intrusions upon a rigidly orderly worldview. Her Deborah moves about Jimmy Stubbs’s kitchen-and-dining-room set with the compulsive flit of an overcaffeinated hummingbird, which makes it all the more jarring when one son drops a particularly weighty Act 2 brick and she stops utterly and icily still.
As for Lescault (Jacobson’s real-life husband), his ailing paterfamilias Francis doesn’t make an appearance until halfway through the proceedings. When he does, though, it’s quite literally a showstopper — though only for intermission, ’cause he’ll go on to deliver a corker of a second act.
There are a handful of awkwardnesses on the way to the inevitable food fight. (What was it Chekhov said about a turkey?) Holcroft wrote the play a decade back on commission from the National Theatre in London, and although a rewrite for U.S. audiences now locates this hot mess of a family in some unnamed North Carolina burg, there are still British locutions peppered thickly enough throughout the text to make specific references to the Tar Heel State and the Eastern Seaboard feel like a hasty gloss. (“I’m sat there in nothing but pantyhose and a bra,” goes one particularly chimeric declaration, which seems to cry out for either a “sitting” or a “knickers.”)
Some of the comedy’s pop-psychological obsessions, particularly its inquiries in the territories of chronic anxiety and ADHD, already feel a touch dated in their naiveté. More substantial a reservation is that while we’ve certainly got our share of things we’re still not ready to talk about, the specific shockers Holcroft pulls out in Act 2 revolve around issues we’ve spent most of the past decade coming loudly and publicly to terms with.
Traditional farces, holiday or otherwise, generally end by putting most of their pieces back together after the rising action sets up some uproarious collision of miscues and misunderstandings. Holcroft has something a little different in mind here: “Rules for Living” will morph from pure farce into something close to full-on psychodrama by the time everyone’s feelings get properly vented. So don’t take a seat at this family gathering without knowing that clearer understandings are part of what she’s pushing this gaggle of legitimately damaged characters toward, and that there won’t be the usual buoyant round of resolutions and reconciliations.
The playwright has taken her title, after all, from the psychological term of art that insists that we identify what works and what doesn’t for us, and that we draw lines to keep us clear of what genuinely strips us of the ability to function. A writer of an earlier generation might have felt the need to strain toward a rosier resolution for this blistered, broken family. Not Holcroft: Sometimes, as her characters discover at the final curtain, what becomes entirely irreconcilable is precisely the people we’re trying to reconcile with.
Rules for Living, through Jan. 4 at Round House Theatre in Bethesda. About 2 hours 20 minutes including intermission. roundhousetheatre.org.
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