As former smalltime chanteuse Mae (Gwen Van Dam) languishes in bed at a senior care facility, preparing to sing a few standards for her fellow geriatric zombies, her overworked and underappreciated daughter Jan (Rhonda Aldrich) tries to coerce long-estranged brother Andrew (Scot Burklin) to come home in an effort to alleviate some of their mother's depression. "At this stage in life," Mae wisely counters, "I should be depressed." As envisioned by playwright Joel Drake Johnson, lord knows she's right.
But Mae kept quiet to protect her marriage when her second husband kicked the teenage Andrew out of the house after the kid admitted he was gay. Andrew now lives in Chicago with his lover, David (Albie Selznick), and isn't eager to return to his long-broken family in Dixon, Ill., dead center of Red State values and, not coincidentally, the boyhood home of Ronald Reagan. As the guys quibble over Andrew's reluctance to visit, a parallel hetero "couple," Jan's ex-husband Chuck (Tom Knickerbocker) and his buddy Tommy (Michael Dempsey), try to decide if it's time to put down the ol' family dog, a question masking the real question: whether Jan and Chuck's marriage is worth salvaging.
Although Johnson's tragicomedy desperately needs a second act, one in which his characters' well-intentioned laboring to make amends with one another throughout the intermissionless short play leads to a nourishing conclusion, what sets his contemporary kitchen-sink drama apart from others in its overtaxed genre is an honesty expressed through dazzling dark humor -- gleaned, one might suspect, from surviving a similar familial dynamic firsthand and feeling compelled to exorcise it in one's art. What's missing in resolution, however, is made up for by Heather Dara Williams' remarkably fluid staging on Theodore Michael Dolas' cooperative set, featuring multiple locations tied together -- with a Midwesternish nod to the repetitious excesses of Samuel Beckett -- by Sylvia Little as an Alzheimer's patient who wanders silently back and forth throughout the action. The riveting performance of Van Dam as the blustery, belligerent Mae anchors Johnson's tale, and Williams' outstandingly facile supporting cast goes right along for the ride, each actor managing to find buried dignity in characters robbed of any hope for functionality.
Presented by and at the Road Theatre Company,
5108 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood.
Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 2 p.m. Jan. 18-Mar. 14.
(866) 811-4111. www.roadtheatre.org.