Reviews

The Country House

Find out what happens when you confine a family of actors with unresolved emotional issues to a small house in Western Massachusetts.

Kate Jennings Grant, Daniel Sunjata, Sarah Steele, Eric Lange, and Blythe Danner in Donald Margulies' The Country House, directed by Daniel Sullivan, at Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.
Kate Jennings Grant, Daniel Sunjata, Sarah Steele, Eric Lange, and Blythe Danner in Donald Margulies' The Country House, directed by Daniel Sullivan, at Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.
(© Joan Marcus)

A clan of actors spends two and a half hours complaining about their problems in a Berkshires summer home. Would you like to join them? While Donald Margulies' new play, The Country House (now making its New York debut at Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre), has the premise of self-involved theatrical drivel, it's not nearly as bad as it sounds. In fact, some of the performances (especially that of the fantastic Blythe Danner) will keep you fascinated to the very end.

The play takes place during the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Grande dame of the stage and screen Anna Patterson (Danner) has invited her sexy protégée (now a major television star) Michael Astor (Daniel Sunjata) to stay at her cottage while his own is being fumigated. She's also hosting her film director son-in-law Walter Keegan (David Rasche) and his new girlfriend Nell (Kate Jennings Grant), much to the consternation of Anna's son Elliot (Eric Lange), who still harbors feelings for Nell after spending a February with her at the Humana Festival. Everyone is still mourning the untimely death of Anna's daughter Kathy (wife to Walter, sister to Elliot), especially Kathy's daughter Susie (Sarah Steele). On top of this, all the women want to sleep with Michael. Fresh grief, professional jealousy, and sexual desire come together for a perfect storm for this stage family already predisposed to drama.

If this territory feels well worn, that's because it is. Margulies freely borrows from two classic Chekhov dramas (Uncle Vanya and The Seagull), updating them to the present and placing the action in Western Massachusetts. Elliot, the failed actor turned failed playwright who believes his life has been a waste, is unmistakably a mash-up of Vanya and Treplyov. Walter and Nell are surrogates for Serebryakov and Yelena, the objects of Vanya's respective ire and desire.

The strained relationships still crackle with tension over a century later, although Margulies tends to draw his characters with broader strokes than Chekhov did. Suffering from a gluten allergy and addicted to antidepressants, Susie is an unlikable millennial stereotype. She seems to have a sarcastic quip for all seasons. Steele's wooden performance doesn't do much to lift this two-dimensional character off the page.

Elliot is even worse, a constant source of misery existing in a state of suspended adolescence. As Michael regales the house with a self-congratulatory tale of his important charity work in the Congo, Elliot interrupts to ask, "You got any weed?" Then he becomes openly, awkwardly hostile. Lange has a charmingly comic presence, but he plays this train wreck as written. No one wants to jump on board, even if he is correct: These Hollywood folk are totally fake.

Sunjata and Rasche both coat their performances with a layer of insincerity that works well. Until deep in the second act, you really can't believe anything they're saying through their lavishly whitened veneers. No wonder Elliot is so crazy.

But while Lange's performance may illicit pity, it never quite reaches sympathy. He blames Anna for his failed career, alleging that she never supported him. But he never mentions a day job, leading us to assume that he's living off her charity while attending auditions (a luxury many struggling actors would love to have). This makes it very hard to get in his corner when he confronts his allegedly cold-hearted mother.

And really, how can one not side with Danner's Anna? She's a grade-A cougar who keeps us in stitches with her always-droll line readings. "I think it's marvelous you found yourself a hobby," she crushingly (and hilariously) tells her son after the first reading of his new play. She's probably the most likable Arkadina ever. Also, there's nothing worse than losing a child, and Danner makes you feel that.

All this unresolved family drama comes spilling out over John Lee Beatty's typically gorgeous living room set. Brass-handled drawers mingle with sagging bookshelves. The walls are covered in framed show posters, including one for Turgenev's A Month in the Country. Rita Ryack's contemporary costumes are no less subtly clever. She outfits Michael in the thinnest of hooded sweatshirts, the kind that can only be worn by those never afraid of being left out in the cold. Habitual schlub Elliot, on the other hand, wears a thick blue hoodie and camo shorts that could have been picked up at Old Navy. Throughout much of the show, realistic rain pelts the upstage windows, while lighting designer Peter Kaczorowski creates the gloom of a summer storm. He later impressively manages to light a blackout.

Director Daniel Sullivan has fashioned an authentic habitat for these creatures of the entertainment industry while garnering some decent performances from the cast. As a result, The Country House is an entertaining evening of theater, even if it isn't a particularly enlightening one. Extended dialogues about the trials of fame or virtues of "selling out" feel simultaneously trite and irrelevant, proving that there are definitely limits to the adage "write what you know." (Most people are not television actors or millionaire directors of action flicks.)

The Country House is at its best when we're able to forget that these people are anything other than just a regular family dealing with depressingly common struggles.

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