Theatre in Review: The Lyons (Cort Theatre)

Nicky Silver has imagined a spectacularly dysfunctional family named The Lyons and it's our good fortune that Linda Lavin is the queen of the pride. She is Rita Lyons, nightmare wife and monster mother, a Chanel-clad visitor from Hades come to torment her alleged loved ones with her scalding tongue. In her case, virtue is vice; Rita is incapable of telling a lie, especially when it would be the humane thing to do. Instead, she breezily calls it as she sees it, and if the collateral damage includes her husband and children -- well, them's the breaks.

The curtain rises on her sitting in the hospital room occupied by her husband, Ben, who is days, possibly hours, away from death. Rita is taking the bad news rather well; in fact, she's perusing a shelter magazine, test-driving various ideas for redoing the living room. Currently, she notes, the sofa is "just some washed out shade of dashed hopes. The chairs are the color of disgust. And the carpet is matted down with resignation." Ben, worn down by the discussion of ice-blue walls and Moroccan themes, moans in despair, "I'm dying Rita." "Yes, I know," she replies. "Try to be positive."

Rita is an equal-opportunity troublemaker. She terrorizes her daughter, Lisa, by noting that one of Lisa's sons "is just a little bit retarded," adding, "It's not a criticism." When she invites her son, Curtis, and his boyfriend to stay with her, Curtis responds with a lengthy tirade about "the Hindenberg of my childhood," recalling an ugly incident with a letter opener and the time Rita threatened him with a foster home if he refused to go antiquing with her; he concludes with a denunciation that ends just this side of hysteria, making absolutely clear that the subject is closed, now and for all time. Rita takes it all in, then adds, "Do you want to think about it?"

That this horrifying creature keeps us in stitches, and, by the time The Lyons is over, even lays claim to our sympathies, is proof of the special sorcery that is Lavin's stock in trade. Her unbelievable timing -- that special homing device that knows exactly where the laugh resides in a line of dialogue -- is well-known. Here she uses it to deliver the most blistering comments in devastatingly casual fashion, following each one up with a look of sheer innocence, as if to say, Look, I didn't make the world. (She's particularly good at this when trying to fix up Lisa, who is divorced and an alcoholic, with a man dying of lymphoma down the hall. "And I think he's Jewish," Rita notes, hopefully.) And then there's Lavin's voice, which ranges from a low rumble to a harpy's wail that, at its highest point, is probably only picked up by dogs from several blocks away. (The middle of her vocal range is reserved for delivering wisecracks that cut six different ways, like a Swiss Army knife.) And yet, while extracting every hilarious drip of hemlock from her lines, she never lets us forget that Rita has been trapped in a loveless marriage for four decades, and, for all the damage she has done to her children, is not unreasonably disappointed in how they wallow in their own misery. There's real anger and authentic heartbreak inside every nerve-shredding remark, which goes a long way toward explaining how families such as this repeat their pathologies from generation to generation.

This last point, I think, helps to explain why The Lyons seems so much stronger than Silver's last few efforts. For a quarter of a century he has acted as a kind of theatrical Margaret Mead; hideously unhappy upper-middle-class families have been his Samoans, and he has recorded their lethal dealings with anthropological rigor. But The Lyons contains something new in his work, an awareness that the elders of these tribes are just as victimized as the children, along with a sense that, at some point, one is responsible for one's own life, no matter what familial horrors have been visited on one. By the end of The Lyons, Silver has even brought around Lisa and Curtis -- a pair of prize basket cases -- to the point of talking halting steps in the direction of adulthood.

Of course, this only happens after two hours of psychological mayhem, as practiced by an expert cast under the precise-as-clockwork direction of Mark Brokaw. Stirring himself up to the point of hyperventilation, Dick Latessa's slam-bang timing as Ben makes him a more-than-worthy opponent for Lavin's Rita. (Most of his lines are too profane to be repeated here.) Kate Jennings Grant's Lisa is a most amusing woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. ("How long are visiting hours?" asks Curtis, five minutes after arriving. "I have no idea," Lisa wails in a tone that indicates they may well be there forever.) Michael Esper's Curtis gives as good as he gets ("My life is one long parade of disappointments," he tells Ben. "And you're the grand fucking marshal."), but, as it happens, he may be the most damaged of all. This becomes apparent in an encounter, in an empty apartment, between him and a hunky real estate agent (smoothly played by Gregory Wooddell), which turns into a harrowing little game of cat and mouse. Brenda Pressley makes the most of the smallish role of the nurse who develops special skills in taking care of the members of the Lyons family.

The production comes in a smart, slick design package, which includes Allen Moyer's photorealistic sets, David Lander's seamless lighting, Michael Krass' acutely character-specific costumes, and David van Tieghem's sound design, which includes some tasty original jazz tunes between scenes.

But most of all there's Lavin, demonstrating her own unique bedside manner (when Ben expresses a fear of hell, she snaps, "Who are you to get into hell? What have you ever done?"), carefully describing a painter's work as "a cross between De Kooning....and Hopper," and delivering the coup de grâce to her ungrateful brood as she sets off on the next stage of her life. By then, we've learned to love Rita and all the Lyons enough to wish them good luck. Believe me, they're going to need it.--David Barbour