FringeNYC 2013: A Homecoming

Review by Sergei Burbank · August 16, 2013

James and Lee spend their twilight years together sharing a home of thirty years under the flightpath of one of New York’s airports. With their grown children out of the house, and with the help of full-time Nurse Callahan, the old married couple navigates their days with the incidental collisions that mark a lifetime spent together -- and the incipient chaos that intrudes as a result of the symtoms of Lee’s Alzheimer’s Disease. As his wife’s window of lucidity appears to narrow, James decides to hold what is for all intents and purposes her final birthday party, and invites his two sons and daughter (and daughter-in-law) home to say goodbye. It is apparently the first time everyone has been under the same roof at once in some time, and not without reason: James likens his family to a powder keg needing only a minor spark to create a conflagration.

This is a potential disaster of their own making: James and Lee’s marriage is not perfect, nor do they pretend it to be. Over the course of the evening the specific sins of their past are colored in: James was a heavy drinker, and both James and Lee were neglectful parents, placing the burdens of parenthood on a barely adolescent James Junior -- an imposition of ill-fitting responsibility for which he still has not forgiven them. Meanwhile, middle child Marty’s marriage to Susan is falling apart, and while their strained relationship is tacked together in order to attend this party/standing wake, her mutual antipathy with Marty’s brother and sister means her presence is a bitter pill no one is happy to swallow.

While all the ingredients are present for a compelling drama, the production never seems to get enough lift for takeoff. The overall energy of the play is as exhausted as its main protagonists, and the actors take full advantage of the copious monologues provided: the end result is a sequence of scenes that drag, one after another, with no impending build of any crisis. We assume there is something to dread about the looming confrontation because we are told so, again and again: when we are introduced to its main ingredient, however, the sense is not that we are watching an agent provocateur extraordinaire, but rather a particularly morose and verbose monologist. 

Kevin Gilmartin provides an appealing set of shoulders to carry the production, and the gradual unveiling of his past failures are all the more disappointing because he is someone we are rooting for from his first moments onstage. His heartbreak is our own, and even if the pains of his present provide expiation for past sins, it doesn’t make that process hurt any less. In Jaqueline Sydney, the production is blessed with an earnest, brave, and committed performer who lays it all on the line for her role. These admirable qualities are wasted with a gratuitous overuse of nudity which, used once, would drive home the shock and awe of such a debilitating mental condition. When deployed more than once, as it is here, it actually detracts from this purpose and dilutes its impact.

In its attempt to capture humanity in all its complexity and contradiction, the script contains failures of logic that are more distracting than enlightening. It is clear that James, while a devoted husband to Lee, was less devoted a father to his children. In James’ retelling, it is Lee who picked up the slack and poured her frustrated academic ambitions into the raising and education of her children after largely being left alone with them. Yet we are also told that James and Lee were absentee parents leaving James Jr. in charge in order to live up their weekends together. The play doesn’t shy away from depicting the rose-colored glasses we all employ at the end of our lives, but this inconsistency -- be it cheerful misremembering or not -- is never resolved.

Other characters are underbaked by dint of being underwritten; it’s hard to know what the point of the youngest sister is, other than to be an audience for the eldest brother’s monologues in order to delay the two brothers’ final confrontation. Similarly, the Catholic Priest in the second act seems a straw man standing in for God, but one suspects that James Jr. would be better off simply addressing the Big Guy Himself.

After a laborious build up, the actual climax of the play is far too quick to be satisfying, and the resolution far too convenient to be organic. What amounts to multiple lifetimes’ worth of anguish and resentment are tied up with a bow and a punch; we’re left wondering why, if it was just that simple, this group of malcontents couldn’t have tied things up much, much sooner.