Theatre in Review: Of Good Stock (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage I)

	Jennifer Mudge, Heather Lind, Alicial Silverstone. Photo: Joan Marcus.

There's been a healthy debate lately about the lack of opportunities for women playwrights, with the group known as The Kilroys publishing lists of new works by women that should be seen. The debate seems to be paying off; last season saw interesting new works by Bess Wohl, Laura Eason, Tracey Scott Wilson, Kate Benson, and Clare Barron, among others, not to mention the Broadway triumph of Fun Home, by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori. That's why it seems particularly ungallant of Manhattan Theatre Club to set the discussion back 30 years with Of Good Stock, which borrows every trick in the dysfunctional family comedy playbook. It's a good thing that the playwright, Melissa Ross, only a few weeks ago gave us Nice Girl, which had vividly imagined characters rooted in a specific time and place. Otherwise, we might wonder what the staff at MTC saw in a playwright who is content to assemble a generic trio of neurotic sisters and set them to squabbling in allegedly hilarious fashion, with one or the other bursting into tears and running upstairs every ten minutes or so. If you can imagine the first draft of a Nora Ephron screenplay with the emotional beats laid out but the motivations and witty repartee not yet put in, you'll have an idea of what Of Good Stock is like.

The sisters are the Stockton girls, daughters of a famous novelist whose rutting ways with the ladies destroyed his marriage to their mother. She died young and the daughters were dispersed to boarding schools, experiences that have left them emotionally scarred. Oddly, even though the father is discussed at length and is said to cast a long shadow over their lives, we never get a sense of what he was like, as an artist or a parent. In any case, he died at the age of 55 in a car crash, with a hooker in the passenger seat, a subject that Ross lamely tries to play for laughs.

The sisters are getting together for a weekend at the family vacation home on Cape Cod. Jess, the eldest, has had a mastectomy, which has caused her to retreat from her husband, Fred, a food writer. (Jess is haunted by her mother's early death, also from cancer, as well as the deaths of her father and grandparents; whatever the prognosis may be -- we never learn for sure -- she is convinced that she will be checking out early.) Celia, the baby of the family, astounds everyone by showing up with her new boyfriend, Hunter, a hairy, hefty college dropout who wants to open a construction business with his father in Missoula, Montana. (He is one of 12 siblings, which allows everyone else to be predictably appalled.) And then there's Amy, the middle sibling, whose self-aggrandizing manner knows no bounds. She bullies her fiancé, Josh (she calls him "babe" every ten seconds), has staged a wedding for her cats, and has sent out wedding invitations that play a tune when opened. When Celia sees one for the first time, she says, "I just threw up in my mouth." And that is about as witty as Of Good Stock gets.

Ross assembles the sisters so that they can have at each other, get drunk, and end up down at the pier, where they bare their frustrations by hurling obscenities into the night air, followed by a laughing jag and a group hug. The author's point seems to be that family relationships trump everything else, but it gets lost as one notices that the Stockton girls have so little in common that they may as well be total strangers. Fred remarks how lucky he is that "the extraordinary Jess Stockton" fell in love with him, but, as written, there's nothing extraordinary about Jess or her sisters; they're just garden-variety basket cases, their sorrows played for easy laughs and borrowed tears.

Anyway, the weekend is mostly a chance for them all to act out their long-running sibling dramas. Amy demands that the house, which was left to Jess, be sold off, but nothing comes of that discussion. In a moment of frustration over her barren state, she says, "My father won a Pulitzer Prize, and I can't even f---ing procreate!" There are some mild jokes about Brooklyn hipsters, Momofuku, and Hunter's way of turning every remark into a question. "Are they always like this?" asks Hunter, warily wondering what he has gotten himself into. In fairness, the men have cutesy little mannerisms, too; at the exact minute that Jess turns 41, Fred produces party hats and confetti, to celebrate the fact that Jess has outlived her mother. And the scenes of Hunter and Celia talking baby talk to each other are best left undescribed.

Under Lynne Meadow's direction, an uneven set of performances proves less than helpful. The best work comes from Jennifer Mudge as Jess, who carries a load of fury under her maternal, family-peacemaker manner; her final showdown with Fred (a solid Kelly AuCoin), who wants to return intimacy to their marriage, is interesting, even if Ross doesn't make enough of it. Heather Lind's Celia, who is supposed to be charmingly immature, is a mass of ticks and kooky poses that quickly becomes tiring. Alicia Silverstone's Amy is a grating cartoon, speaking in a modified squwak, and, when reduced to tears, emitting a wail so high-pitched that I'll bet dogs hear it on the Upper West Side. Greg Keller is convincing as Josh, who disappears from the play early on, leaving Amy, in her moment of abandonment, to smoke and drink and insult everyone else. Nate Miller makes something interesting out of Hunter, who, despite his ingenuous manner, is capable of pulling a fast one, fooling Fred and Jess with a manufactured emotional outburst.

This is one of those productions where the design is much more fully realized than the play. Santo Loquasto's attractive set uses a turntable to take us to Jess and Fred's living room, kitchen, patio, and the dock on their beach. It is lit with his usual meticulous attention to detail by Peter Kaczorowski. Tom Broecker's costumes are beautifully suited to each character. David Van Tieghem contributed the pulsing score, featuring bass and piano, along with effects that include ocean waves, seagulls, and a car pulling out of the driveway.

Interestingly, most of what we know about the Stockton sisters comes from their connections to men; if they have jobs, we never find out about them. (Jess manages her father's estate, which mostly means turning down film offers.) If this play is supposed to be an example of the fresh ideas that female playwrights can bring to the theatre, we are in much more trouble than we know. Late in the evening, Jess screams, "I'm trapped in a bad chick flick!" She said it; I didn't.--David Barbour