Theatre in Review: Blood From a Stone (The New Group/Theatre Row)

In Blood from a Stone, Tommy Nohilly, a first-time playwright, means to draw the most poisonous family portrait since the Westons, of Osage County, Oklahoma, last got together to bury one of their own. It's a tall order, one that, despite a considerable talent for stirring the cauldron, is probably beyond him at this point. But that's not to say he doesn't produce some memorably bilious encounters among a cast of characters as they speed their way to hell in a handbasket.

As dysfunctional family plays go, Blood From a Stone is relatively intimate. The middle-aged Bill and Margaret act out their spectacularly bad marriage in a tumbledown disaster of a home located in the middle of nowhere, Connecticut. Their relations have degenerated to the point where they sleep on different floors and purchase separate cartons of milk. Bill, a miser and a bully, keeps the thermostat just above freezing and refuses to pay Margaret's phone bills. When she requests new kitchen tiles, he replaces four of them, leaving the rest intact. On those rare occasions when they actually speak to each other, the invective flies, along with the occasional fist. (In a typically tender exchange, Margaret tells her mate, "Ah, you're always playing fuckin' dumb, 'last one to know everything' crap. There's something wrong with your brain, you know that.") It's an open family secret that Bill is seeing another woman -- which suits Margaret just fine; it keeps him out of her hair, leaving her free to lavish all her love on her cat.

The core of the play focuses on Bill, Margaret, and their two sons. Matt spends his time, like his father, cheating on his wife with another woman -- that is, when he's not committing burglary to finance his gambling habit. (Foxwoods looms large in this family's life.) Travis has escaped, so to speak, to New York, but it hasn't proven far enough, as Margaret keeps him on the phone for hours, crying the blues. In Connecticut, he is the pathetic center of the action, always trying -- and failing -- to make peace while rummaging through Margaret's purse for her prescription painkillers.

Over the course of three acts, things keep sliding downward as Travis, who is planning a trip to the West Coast, finds himself constantly dragged back into the family vortex. Recriminations are aired in multiples; home truths are bared, yet everyone holds on to his or her illusions. Meanwhile, the house is literally falling apart -- rain is pouring in, ceiling panels litter the floor, and there's definite chill in the air thanks to all the windows that have been punched in. (The play takes place at Christmastime, if only so Nohilly can get on stage a hideous fake white tree to be hurled in a moment of pique.)

At its best, Blood From a Stone crackles with the electricity of unbridled fury, and Nohilly is aided in this effort by a cast that seems uncannily tuned into his wavelength. Gordon Clapp's Bill veers wildly from explosions to fugue states -- that new girlfriend has him taking anger-management classes, to little or no effect -- verbally battering everyone in his orbit and offering up his prescriptions for a better world. (One of them involves gathering up all known drug dealers and flying them to Baghdad.) Ann Dowd's Margaret is a formidable sparring partner, with a vocabulary borrowed from a stevedore and a pretty good right fist. Thomas Guiry's Matt may be a liar, a thief, and more than a little deluded, but he does understand that his conflicts with Travis are only a mirror of their parents' battles. (As he sadly tells his brother, "You have Mom and I have Dad. That's the way it is.") Ethan Hawke's Travis, speaking in a gravelly murmur punctuated by a raking smoker's cough, valiantly tries to declare a truce. He doesn't even raise his voice when he backs Bill up to the wall, and, aggressively pointing his index finger at him, lets him know that he knows a bully when he sees one. In this house, a controlled anger is more upsetting than anything else.

There may be a real zinger of a drama embedded in Blood From a Stone, but more work is needed to extract it. There's not enough meaningful action; Nohilly simply lets his characters have at each other, fighting round after round to diminishing returns. The play was cut by at least half an hour during previews, but it's still at least 30 minutes too long. He could eliminate two full scenes and characters -- Sarah, Bill and Margaret's daughter and the only non-basket-case in the family, and Yvette, an old flame of Travis' -- without doing any damage at all. (This is in spite of the fact that Natasha Lyonne and Daphne Rubin-Vega are fine as Sarah and Yvette, respectively.) Also lacking is a larger sense of resonance. A play like August: Osage County says something about the state of American society in the late Bush years; Nohilly's focus on the characters is so intense that you end feeling trapped in the sordidness of it all. Scott Elliott's direction tends to put the brakes on the script's more melodramatic elements, resulting in an oddly halting pace; the incident-packed final scene ends on a surprisingly flat note.

There's nothing flat about the production design. Derek McLane's set, depicting a combination kitchen/living room, is a grimy, ratty, water-stained wreck; no detail is too small for this fine designer. (Jeremy Chernick provided the special effects that allow the house to fall apart so persuasively.) The set has a ceiling, so Jason Lyons, the lighting designer, takes advantage of side light to produce a series of deeply melancholy early-morning and late-afternoon looks. Theresa Squire's costumes are, appropriately, right out of the Goodwill bin, although she takes care to make Rubin-Vega look terrific. Bart Fasbender's symphony of sound effects includes the sound of the porch being ripped off the side of the house by Bill in a moment of road rage.

Blood From a Stone isn't really a success, but Nohilly has something, and it was probably smart of The New Group to take a chance on him. Two or three plays down the road, he may really deliver a knockout punch.--David Barbour