We Live Here

Zoe Kazan is a theater artist to watch. As an actor, she has turned in impressive performances in works by Chekhov, Inge, and Kushner. As a playwright, her first work, "Absalom," showed promise when it premiered at the 2009 Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. The plot was somewhat convoluted and veered dangerously close to soap operatics, but there were several incisive observations of the complex connections among a family of self-involved writers. For her second work, "We Live Here," now at Manhattan Theatre Club's City Center space, Kazan has returned to a family setting and wisely kept the action to a single through-line rather than the multiple plot threads of her first play. While there is much to admire in this funny and touching portrait of a family coming to terms with grief, there are rough edges that need to be smoothed out.

The setting, beautifully realized by designer John Lee Beatty, is the New England home of Lawrence (Mark Blum), an easygoing classics professor, and Maggie (Amy Irving), his more than slightly controlling wife. Their elder daughter, Althea (Jessica Collins), a prickly kindergarten teacher, is about to marry Sandy (Jeremy Shamos), a kind and understanding painter. The dramatic wrench is thrown into the works by the younger daughter, Dinah (Betty Gilpin), a Juilliard music student, who brings along a new boyfriend, Daniel (Oscar Isaac), a teacher at her college. It's not Daniel's age—he's several years older than Dinah—that precipitates the family crisis. It's slowly revealed that Daniel has a history with the family, having dated Althea's late twin sister, Andromeda, when they were teenagers. Another twist, involving the cause of Andromeda's death—a deep, dark secret no one talks about—is delivered in the second act, putting the wedding in jeopardy.

The first act is a charming and satisfying snapshot of a family attempting to relate to each other despite the elephant in the room—Andromeda's death—that everyone is trying to ignore. Kazan writes sharp dialogue and effectively captures the love-hate relationship between the sisters, the tension and affection in the parents' marriage, and the tentativeness of the romances among the younger people. Director Sam Gold, who captured the rhythms of everyday life so accurately in his staging of Annie Baker's "Circle Mirror Transformation" and "The Aliens," performs similar feats of verisimilitude. The cast offers restrained work. Blum and Irving endow Lawrence and Maggie with subterranean sorrow, camouflaged by exaggerated attention to household details. Collins and Gilpin create layers of complex feelings in the siblings' ambivalent union. Shamos makes Sandy tender without turning him sappy. Isaac isn't given much to work with in the enigmatic Daniel, but he manages to suggest the craving for affection that draws Daniel to the family.           

Unfortunately, Kazan gets too heavy-handed in the second act. Without giving the plot away, two characters display self-destructive behavior that wasn't even hinted at in the first act. Their actions seem to come out of nowhere. If Kazan had toned down the excessive theatrics, "We Live Here" could have been a shatteringly real picture of a grieving clan rather than a half-successful one.             

Presented by Manhattan Theatre Club at New York City Center Stage I, 131 W. 55th St., NYC. Oct. 12–Nov. 6. Tue., 7 p.m.; Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat. and Sun., 2 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m. (212) 581-1212 or www.manhattantheatreclub.com. Casting by David Caparelliotis.