A searing family drama from Leslye Headland comes to Broadway
The first picture of Leslye Headland’s family drama, “The Cult of Love,” on Broadway at Hayes, looks like a Christmas card. Behind a gauze curtain, most of the ten-person cast stand in festive symmetry, carefully arranged around a living room glowing with thousands of holiday lights. We think about this painting for a moment, before the scrim rises and the action begins. An introductory pause gives the audience the opportunity to applaud the star-studded ensemble. It also suggests that what we’re about to see is brilliant, and a little wrong.
We are in the seemingly happy home of a staunchly Christian family, the Dahls, and the elders — Jenny (Mary Winningham, nominated for a 2022 Tony for “Girl from the North”) and her mentally deteriorating husband, Bill (David Rush). , who played an advisor on “Succession”) — summoned their adult children home for the holiday. The family members regularly break into arrangements of impressively harmonious Osmond family-level hymns that they’ve clearly been singing together forever. Some pairs of siblings may roll their eyes, but often they join in, shaking a maraca here, playing washboard there.
At first, everyone is feeling a little Grinchy because Jenny won’t be serving Christmas Eve dinner until the family sweetheart, recovering heroin addict Johnny (Christopher Sears), arrives with his friend and fellow Narcotics Anonymous member Lauren (Barbie Ferreira). These two have learned to be frank about their issues, unlike the rest of the family, who are still in an undisclosed crisis. Theologian Mark (Zachary Quinto) and his wife Rachel (Molly Bernard) are hiding about the breakup. Pregnant Diana (Shailene Woodley), a bigot, and her Episcopal priest husband, James (Christopher Lowell), can’t stop making homophobic comments while Evie (Rebecca Henderson) and her new wife, Pippa (Roberta Colindrez), insist on their relationship. teeth. (Henderson and Headland, the playwright, are married in real life.) Meanwhile, Dad is losing his memory, though Mom won’t admit it. The most chilling line in the play is delivered sarcastically by Pippa. “Whether you like it or not, You “They’re parents now,” she told the feuding siblings, before parting ways with her Airbnb.
“The Cult of Love,” which Headland said was based on her family, is this season’s festival of domestic violence, a Broadway staple with a history that extends at least as far back as Clifford Odets’ hit musical “Awake and Sing.” (1935). But “Cult,” which premiered in 2018, moves faster and delivers more powerful blows than other works in its category. Headland has been producing films and TV shows for a decade — she co-created the Netflix series Russian Doll — and in the play’s 100-minute runtime, she senses conflicting styles at work. She and her director, Tripp Coleman, expertly ratchet up the tension through overlapping dialogue, using it to show the rhythms of addiction and relapse. (Our hunger for dysfunction-driven entertainment is, unfortunately, a kind of dependence on it.)
Sometimes Headland overloads the table with narrative. However, when she takes a breath, it creates moments of real connection, as when Bill, exuding amnesia, prays for peace among his children. Woodley brings out Diana’s unassuming capacity for combustion, and Colindres and Ferreira, who play two strangers unaffected by their welcome into the Dahl household, do a fine job. But elsewhere, Headland’s television training undermines her. It seemed like it needed a few more episodes for all the character arcs and venerable speeches to arrive.
“The Cult of Love” has a subtitle, “Pride,” which refers to the arrogance of faith and to one of the Seven Deadly Sins; Headland wrote a series of plays based on each play. In 2010, she made a splash with the comedy “The Bachelorette,” about voracious girls. Two years later, she wrote a greed-themed office sitcom called The Help, drawing from her own work for Harvey Weinstein. In Headland’s “dirty figures,” as she calls those works, there is usually an alpha—a leader whose behavior infects those below him in the group. In “The Cult of Love,” the alpha is Jenny, the ungrateful head of the family, played by Winningham with chilling precision. It helps that Winningham has a beautiful but nasal folk-song tone, which — whether she’s singing or speaking — cuts through other voices, just beautiful voices.
The Cult of Love, unlike the other Sin plays, was written when Headland was in her thirties, having married Henderson, whose character, Effie, can be seen as a stand-in for Headland. Evie’s addiction—which she fights just as much as Johnny fights drugs and Mark fights God—is an addiction to the toxic family itself. Should she abandon them? Performing an intense psychodrama about your wife’s family, night after night, must be exhausting. Henderson approaches the task with obvious gravitas, ceding the right to tragedy, as almost everyone does, to Bill Rush. His memory problems, covered up by his unlistening wife, fade from the play’s attention—it’s not climactic material—but you’ll remember them, or at least you did, in the days that follow.
On the same weekend that I saw “Cult of Love,” I also saw “No Boss,” the latest offering from the avant-garde group Oklahoma Nature Theater. The production, at Skirball, is a two-and-a-half-hour dance theater marathon, featuring a full ballet company, performed without interruption. The company, which has won numerous Obie Awards and international acclaim, has endured its own family psychodrama, relating to the multi-year project “Life and Times.” (There was a rift between the company’s leaders, Pavol Leska and Kelly Cooper, and its members.)
As with the Dahls, the nightmarish “No Boss”—subtitled “An Enlightenment Ballet of Two Immoral Acts”—relies on holiday music to distract us from the ugliness of dealing with others. An extended recording of Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker” plays while narrator Robert M. Johansson deftly narrates the plot of the show, which is performed by dancers and mimes. There are no mice and no soldiers. Instead, Johansson tells the bizarre and harrowing tale of an actor-turned-security guard (Ilan Bachrach) whose rise as Per Ubu to tyrannical power involves repeated sexual assaults (often of his own, by a dancing group of “personal demons”) and cannibalism Humans. He is getting closer to the war he is waging against another security company.
Liska and Copper’s ballet starts out as a delight and then deliberately overstays its welcome. In the ballet’s story mode, the team brings the main characters’ props onto the stage — such as scarves representing the blood of several of the security guard’s victims — and then emerges with happy little planes. Ha ha, go! But a small plane of nine thousand might make you want to scream. You’ll find it just as provocative or punishing as you enjoy other surreal horror projects. I was reminded of French artist Christian Boltanski’s circular video work “L’Homme Qui Tousse” from 1969, in which a man vomits fake blood onto his chest, seemingly forever, and Casper Kelly’s short film “Too Many Cooks.” from 2014, which obsessively repeats the fake sitcom theme song. (What is funny becomes boring, what is funny becomes scary).
As is usual these days, this major show was held in the city center for only three days. The show satirizes the primal aesthetic of European high culture, but it also draws on the remnants of that culture: there is not enough support in the United States for such a daring, resource-intensive work, so the show was co-commissioned by the Ruhrtriennale. The Düsseldorfer Schuspielhaus and Bard College. I was grateful for the return of Oklahoma Nature Theater, which had disturbed my consciousness, but was a little frustrated by the acidic score-settling echoes of “Cult of Love.” Johansson’s narrator repeatedly refers to the actors’ narcissism and hunger for approval. Liska and Cooper’s text also makes, uncomfortably, a constant and mocking reference to Bachrach’s body. (The security guard not only took a shower, but “stuffed” himself in the bathtub, Johansson says.) “Do you want the lights?” I imagine Alpha Theater of Nature asking. “This is how it burns.” But that’s what we expect from our holiday entertainment these days. All our theater makers are angry kids, and… You They are parents now. ♦