SAFE HOUSE
by L.B. Browne
Directed by Benjamin Viertel
Featuring Marc Kudisch and Karen Ziemba
Theatre Row
Official Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
The spectacularly successful comedy screenwriting team, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, have a principle of craft they stick to assiduously. Each new character is introduced—as they phrase it—“carrying an axe.” By which they mean (if it isn’t obvious) with a conflict already in progress—a problem unsolved, an issue unresolved, their own at-odds personality; something that immediately puts them at play against the resistance of something or someone in the storytelling universe.
That, in spades, is the modus operandi of Safe House, the new play by L(auren). B. Browne. The central playing area is a bunker-in-progress below a suburban house in Pennsylvania, during the days leading up to a Presidential election. The survivalist bunker-builder is older middle-aged Rock (Marc Kudisch), whose name alone defines his politics; he’s also nursing, in secret, a neurological illness that has him hallucinating, which exacerbates his paranoia. (The visions include a younger-than-he version of his father, whom he calls “the General” [Glenn Seven Allen].) His wife, helping, tolerant, understanding more deeply than she lets on (think: a more contemporary Linda Loman) is Slipper (Karen Ziemba)—so named, one imagines, because she has to be the point of détente for various family factions, which she almost immediately has to do, when her older, attorney daughter, Ashley (Anna Roman), arrives with news that she’s just heard from her younger sister, who wants to return home. Ashley is a liberal, which Rock barely tolerates, but her sister—estranged for some years, a possibly-former drug addict, who tortured the family with long absences and ultimately left home—has been disowned by Rock; and the prospect of her return sends him into a fury. He lays down the law: she’s not welcome. And of course, there’s no play if that decree holds; the buffer of Ashley and Slipper wears down Rock’s resistance after Claire (Grace Church) arrives anyway. (Her very much younger self [Julianna Lynne] figures into her father’s hallucinatory memories too.) But she has arrived with her own unexpected axe; actually several—and if you thought Rock was a micro-manager before, well…!
The play is a serious-minded look at how, in the current climate, divided politics can lead to a divided family, but it loads that on top of issues that exist internally, though one can argue a kind of chicken-or-the-egg POV. Did the politics create the internal divisions or did the internal divisions create the politics? Ms Brown wisely refuses to spoon feed an answer.
One might also debate whether or nor Ms Browne has overloaded the play. This isn’t just a drama of people who gather representing different factions of a cross-section, destined for a natural collision of personae (a la The Boys in the Band), but people who enter each with his/her plotted story to play out. It put me in/mind of Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, a play I have loved since its first, slightly experimental (and, alas, ill-fated) Broadway revival in 1972. But one I have loved with all the passion who knows—I knew consciously, even as I was watching it for the first time—was taking on too much all at once. That said, I don’t know how else it could have been delivered. Remove a thread and you lessen its social gravitas, even its wit. The same may be said of Safe House. For all its melodramatic trappings, Ms Browne doesn’t fall prey to their traps. She’s serious-minded but not solemn; her characters get and earn their (appropriate) laughs too.
Safe House is neatly and unobtrusively directed by Benjamin Viertel, and under his direction, the cast make the kind of memorable impressions that tend to accompany first interpreters of iconic roles. In particular, Kudisch, Ziemba and Roman own their roles. (In a more functional position, Justin Lee Miller completes the ensemble, playing two cameo but catalytic roles.)
Safe House may not be a great play, but like Ms Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Mart Crowley’s overlooked family reminiscence, A Breeze from the Gulf, Herb Gardner’s too-long-neglected Thieves (I know: I’m dating myself), it’s one of those conspicuously imperfect yet still-beautiful works that glows with a unique imprimatur. L.B. Browne exhibits the vision, style and control of craft to be a potentially important playwright in the company of those others.