Review: In Broken Snow, Tony Danza Plays a Bad Dad

You can never know everything about your father, nor should you—especially when he’s as emotionally abusive as Kris Berner, the haunted old man portrayed by Tony Danza in Ben Andron’s Broken Snow, now making its world premiere at Theatre71, in association with NewYorkRep. A three-man drama that benefits from a first-rate cast, it aims for unsettling profundity but lands in a big fluffy pile of clichés.

The first one we encounter is a superfluous introductory monologue. “I want to tell you a story, but I don’t believe you’re ready to hear it,” Danza addresses the audience, all ticket-buyers who knew what they were signing up for. Reconsidering his statement he goes on, “Or perhaps I’m just not ready to tell it…” Getting warmer. He proceeds to suggest that this play will be about a moment “where everything changes,” a tall order on which the script only partially delivers.

It would have been a more powerful choice to open with the scene that follows, in which Steven (Tom Cavanagh) sneaks in through the front window of the untidy home where the action takes place, only to be confronted by James (Michael Longfellow) pointing a gun at him. After a not-particularly tense standoff dotted with unconvincing stage combat (by Rod Kinter), the two men discover they are half-brothers—sons of the recently deceased Kris, a minor con artist who spent his final days squatting in this house, paying the mortgage in the name of its dead owner and living off the grid (the explanation of this scheme raises more questions than it answers). They reminisce about what an asshole dad was through a series of flashbacks and try to piece together the significance of their shared inheritance: an old cigar box full of black-and-white photos.

Without spoiling what the photos depict, I can reveal that it’s a trope dramatists won’t be able to deploy much longer without writing a period piece. Danza is 75 and playing a character who is at least 90 to make the timeline work.

It’s not that the box-full-of-secrets can never be a dramatically compelling device. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins used it to great effect in Appropriate, but while the newly discovered evidence in that play threatens to disrupt a cherished narrative about a dead patriarch and demolish what remains of his family, the photographs in Broken Snow merely underline what Steven and James (half-brothers who have only recently become aware of each other’s existence) already know—Kris was a sadistic jerk, the very opposite of Tony Micelli, Danza’s cuddly sitcom dad on Who’s the Boss?

We first discover that in a flashback in which Kris feeds 8-year-old James a birthday cupcake laced with cyanide, to teach him a lesson about not trusting strange baked goods … or something. In a later scene, an adult Steven meets his estranged father for the first time, only for Kris to reject him in the most obnoxious way possible, via armchair philosophy. After calling their relationship an insignificant “biological circumstance,” he then attacks the whole notion of justice, which he infers is precious to the young cop-in-training: “Let me tell you something they sure as hell won’t teach you in some school of law; for there to be justice, there has to be an objective right and wrong. And there is no such thing.”

Danza sells these lines with the confidence of an undergraduate debate-me bro who has just binged a toxic combination of Nietzsche and Foucault, and his steady grandfatherly delivery suggests that he isn’t likely to change his mind. This is a man who has spent decades intellectually justifying his dickishness.

Cavanagh allows us to see Steven’s long-incubated reunion fantasy burst into flames in his tearless eyes, heartbreaking adult restraint from a man who is still holding out a candle for dad. Longfellow’s deadpan smartass schtick works well here: As the son who actually lived with Kris, he obviously needed to develop layers of emotional armor.

Despite these well-crafted performances, director Colin Hanlon’s production feels strangely listless for a drama that opens with an armed confrontation. Perhaps it is the obviously fake gunshots we hear over the speaker system (sound design is by Bill Toles). Scott Adam Davis’s set certainly looks like an old lady’s home, complete with vinyl kitchen chairs and a putrid recliner. Lisa Zinni’s costumes range from the expected (Longfellow’s jacket-over-hoodie combo is the international uniform for nogoodniks) to the tantalizingly unexplained (Danza wears a chic grey overcoat in his opening and final scenes, somewhat incongruous with the outsider image he has cultivated but suggestive of a more complicated story that the playwright declines to tell). Lighting designer Jeff Croiter signals flashbacks by ringing the stage in blue LEDs, creating a gentle glow of memory around some startlingly rough anecdotes.

But none of these individual design elements make much of a difference one way or another. The thing sucking the life out of Broken Snow is the black hole of stakes at its center. Nothing can be done about dad’s past, and it’s not clear that either of his surviving sons are interested in maintaining a relationship with each other, so why should we care on their behalf?

Andron seems to want to say something about generational trauma passed down from father to son. And in this case, by posthumously revealing his past, Kris seems to be playing one last nasty practical joke on his progeny. Sometimes it is kinder to take your secrets to the grave.