Beth Henley's poetic and sporadically powerful new memory play Family Week receives the virtuoso performance it demands from Angelina Phillips, who plays Claire, a patient at the Pastures Recovery Center somewhere in the American desert.

Phillips is absolutely, undeniably brilliant as a mental patient trying to cope with the murder of her son, her family's idiosyncrasies and antipathy, and her own bleak but not utterly hopeless future.

"I don't want to have a spoiled life because my son was shot to death," says Claire, seemingly numb with a mixture of grief and slivers of hope and reason, early in the play. "I was a good mother. Overqualified. A master's degree in elementary ed[...]