Theatre in Review: Cult of Love (Second Stage Theater/Hayes Theater)

	David Rasche. Photo: Joan Marcus

"We are in the middle of a meltdown," announces Ginny, the matriarch presiding over a houseful of psychological basket cases in Cult of Love. Not that this is anything new: In the last year or so, the Hayes Theater has become the go-to halfway house for desperately dysfunctional families. Just last season, we had the aggrieved siblings of Appropriate, battling over a family manse with an appalling antebellum backstory. This was followed by the poisonous triangle of Paula Vogel's Mother Play, in which the boozing, self-destructive title character alternately abuses or abandons her gay son and daughter. (The Hayes' recent history also includes the rudderless, occasionally criminal, tribe of Between Riverside and Crazy and the fractious clan of Grand Horizons, one of whom expresses their displeasure by driving a truck through a wall.)

Cult of Love isn't nearly as scintillating as these entertainments, but not for lack of trying: A Christmas-themed domestic dustup, it's a stocking stuffed with enough neuroses and narcissistic wounds for everyone. Ginny and her husband, Bill, are hosting the annual gathering of their adult children; the cover story is they are unusually close, united by their love of music and grounded in Christianity. In reality, each of the four younger Dahls is poised on the edge of a precipice, and getting together only exacerbates their problems.

Mark, the official golden boy, has just completed a clerkship under John Roberts but doesn't want a law career; his wife, Ruth, is halfway out the door. Evie, "the famous chef," is furious that she and her wife, Pippa, are barely tolerated, and keeps threatening to bail on the holiday dinner. Evie's biggest beef is with her sister, Diana, the only believer of her generation, exhibiting worrying signs of religious mania. (Nagging questions: Why have Diana and her husband, James, an Episcopalian priest, been holed up at Bill and Ginny's place for a month? And why isn't James holding services at his church?) Dinner is being held for the late-arriving Johnny, a recovering drug addict with a rap sheet of bad decisions. (For example, that three-week marriage in Arizona. Or was it three months? No one knows for sure.) As if this Dahl's house weren't cluttered enough, there's clear evidence that Bill is experiencing significant cognitive decline. No wonder Ginny serves Manhattans in an industrial-sized punchbowl.

At first, it looks as if Bill's troubles will provide the evening's main thrust, but playwright Leslye Headland can't stop skittering from issue to issue, a technique that ensures none of the characters gets the attention he or she deserves. Mark, in particular, is so underwritten that he barely registers as a character; he is apparently haunted by his decision to forego ordination after divinity school but, until the end, you have to guess at this. (Even less believable is the Jewish Rachel's long-ago decision to convert to Christianity for Mark.) Johnny's addiction is chalked up to Ginny's decision to suppress his childhood career in chess but that's all we find out about him. Evie has such an enormous chip on her shoulder that it's a wonder Pippa doesn't get sick and tired of placating her.

Headland suggests that this grueling Christmas ritual proves no Dahl offspring can ever leave home and, admittedly, the playwright has some fun with the family's arcane rituals. Pippa, seeking counsel from Rachel, asks, "I couldn't come to Christmas when we were dating and suddenly I can?" "Oh yeah," Rachel replies. "I mean they are homophobic, but you can come now that you're married." Rachel adds that even after she converted, she wasn't allowed to sleep with Mark in Bill and Ginny's house, because they weren't yet married. "So...nothing makes sense," Pippa says. It's just...chaos." Rachel thoroughly assents.

But, as Cult of Love nervously shifts between comedy and drama, hopping from crisis to crisis, it struggles to find a focus. We're meant to see Ginny as the author of her children's troubles, but, as played by Mare Winningham, she is selfish and more than a bit morally blind but not the polarizing, destructive force the script claims. (Although the two properties are very different, Cult of Love sometimes recalls Hidden Valley Road, Robert Kolker's nonfiction account of a family plagued by terrible secrets yet held hostage to its self-created mythology.) We're also meant to see the destructive effects of the Dahls' religion, a point that gets blunted because Headland seems to view Christianity as a unitary phenomenon devoid of shading and nuance. We never get a sense of Bill and Ginny's faith but the bill of indictments, most notably homophobia, that the playwright files against Anglicanism -- in most cases the mildest of most tolerant of practices -- makes little sense in this context.

Nevertheless, the director, Trip Cullman, cracks his whip, keeping the members of this disturbed menagerie bouncing around John Lee Beatty's gorgeous Connecticut country farmhouse, festively decorated with twinkle lights. Cullman is especially good at catching the family's wild mood shifts, moving from open verbal warfare to group singalongs (with instruments) in less than a minute. He also orchestrates a funny/sad morning-after photo session featuring those members of the household who have made it through the night.

But the actors are only effective to the extent the script allows. Zachary Quinto struggles to find a coherent throughline in Mark's character but the material isn't there; the same is true of Molly Benard's Rachel, although at least she lands a few jaundiced laughs. Diana, whose true situation is held back for a long time, is nearly as hard to read, but Shailene Woodley, a Broadway debutante, makes the most of her big breakdown scene. Rebecca Henderson's Evie grows monotonous with her endless complaints, but Christopher Sears injects some energy with Johnny's brutal candor.

Rather better are the outsider characters, including Roberta Colindrez as the patient and wise Pippa and Barbie Ferreira as Loren, Johnny's twelve-step sponsoree, who comes along with the ride. David Rasche is touching as Bill, struggling to put his thoughts into words and gifting his children with hugs they mostly tolerate.

Beatty's set is given a warmly incandescent atmosphere by Heather Gilbert's lighting; she also nicely frames Mark and Rachel in a sad moment of intimacy. (A sunrise effect in the final scene doesn't quite come off, however.) Costume designer Sophia Choi has seemingly raided the LL Bean catalog to dress the Dahls but also provides certain characters, like the raffish Johnny, with more individualized looks. Darron L. West delivers various useful effects -- car motors, a shovel on the sidewalk -- in addition to what sounds like the Furies coming awake following a particularly bruising episode.

Line by line, the script has a hit-or-miss quality: Ginny's lengthy explanation of why she never allowed sleepovers is one for the books, but the play sometimes substitutes rudeness for wit. (Listening to a Christmas hymn, Evie says, "Why was Joseph so angry?" "Because he is fucking asshole." Mark cracks, getting a laugh the laziest way possible.) Then again, the play ends with an out-of-the-blue speech by Mark that is a piercingly beautiful defense of Christianity in its purest form. It's a shape-shifting work, to be sure, and not always to its advantage. Headland works as a showrunner on various streaming series, and one wonders if she hasn't gotten a little too used to the twist-a-minute format of so many current shows. There's a lot to think about in Cult of Love, except we never get a chance to do so. Compared to the other families mentioned above, the Dahls generate more mayhem than insight. --David Barbour