We All Fall Down - Huntington Theatre Company
Photo credit: Nile Hawver. Pictured: The cast of We All Fall Down
We All Fall Down – Huntington Theatre Company
Review by James Wilkinson
This piece also ran on Edge Media Network, Here
We All Fall Down is presented by Huntington Theatre Company. Written by Lila Rose Kaplan. Directed by Melia Bensussen. Scenic Design: Judy Gallen. Costume Design: Karen Perry. Lighting Design: Russell H. Champa. Sound Design: David Remedios.
The question looming over We All Fall Down, now playing at the Huntington Theatre Company, is a simple one. One word: Why? For the characters on stage, this encapsulates the central mystery. The various members of the Stein family have been called together to celebrate Passover, but no one’s quite sure what they’re doing there. They’ve never partaken in religious holidays before, so why is the family matriarch so insistent that they begin now? But there’s another layer to that question, one that managed to wrap itself around my viewing experience and take hold. As the Stein family drama unfolded, that word “Why?” kept pecking away at the back of my head in the form of “Why is she doing that?” “Well, why is he doing that?” “Wait, why is she doing that?” The play by Lila Rose Kaplan is ostensibly a comedy, so before I dive in here, I’ll happily concede that a certain amount of character exaggeration should be expected. But there comes a point in the reach for comedy and moments of high drama where it feels like logic is getting thrown out the window. As the tiny inconsistencies begin to build up, the play becomes almost maddening to watch. The real kicker is finally delivered late in the play when one character confesses to another “I don’t know why I say these things” and I began to seriously wonder if I was being trolled.
We All Fall Down covers the hours leading up to the first Seder meal that the Stein family has ever hosted. Heads of family, Linda (Eleanor Reissa) and Saul (Stephen Schnetzer), never really indulged in the religious side of their Jewish heritage when raising their two daughters. Now, both are grown with Sami (Liba Vaynberg) running a charter school out in California and Ariel (Dana Stern) studying to be a yoga teacher while living with her parents. Sami’s been called in to celebrate Passover this year as has Saul’s sister, Nan (Phyllis Kay), Linda’s friend, Beverly (Sarah Newhouse) and Linda’s assistant, Ester (Elle Borders). The desire to observe the holiday comes solely from Linda though no one is quite clear as to why she’s so insistent. Much of the reason why the family never celebrated the holidays in the first place can be traced back to her leftist politics during her college years. Nevertheless, this year Linda doesn’t so much approach the holiday as attack it, determined to bring the family together for a meal. We’ll eventually get a more concrete reason behind Linda’s behavior, but not before family members clash, secrets are revealed and bridges are mended. We All Fall Down falls into that grand tradition in American playwrighting: snapshots of families on the verge of crisis.
Right off the bat, there’s something a bit disorienting about the way Kaplan structures her script. Ostensibly, the play takes place over just a few hours but Kaplan breaks up the narrative into a series of individual scenes between different characters that all take place in the same room. By constantly wiping the stage clean so that new characters can interact, it instead gives the impression that what we’re watching takes place over a series of days. It’s an issue that’s indicative of the play’s larger problem where it feels like it keeps going for what it thinks works in the moment with no sense of how that decision will affect the whole. For this production, the Huntington has assembled a great cast, but too often I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were struggling to figure out how all of the various pieces of their character fit together.
The most glaring example of this is Linda who comes across as practically schizophrenic over the course of the evening. The script gives the character a handful of one-liners that Reissa delivers with a wonderful deadpan delivery out of the corner of her mouth, (Phyllis Kay, as Nan, gets even more of these and she lets those lines sing as she spits them out), but attempts at broader humor just seem off. Individual scenes where Linda throws a cell phone in a toilet after a moment of mild irritation with the device, indulges in some theatrical costume changes and blows a phone conversation with Ellen Degeneres had me wondering if the big reveal of the show was going to be that she had dementia (is it a spoiler to say that she doesn’t?). They certainly don’t seem like the actions of an author and psychologist who’s at least put together enough to have an assistant and finished writing a book.
But the problems don’t stay contained to one character. Sammi is more or less our audience surrogate and Vaynberg does a decent job playing the pillar at the center of the story, but she still has to contend with her own traps of characterization. At one point, Sammi frets about the fact that her fiancé texted that he was stuck in traffic and still hasn’t arrived. In what’s supposed to be a touching moment between mother and daughter, she confesses that she’s worried he’s not coming and that they won’t ultimately get married as she’s “too much” for him. But where does this emotion come from? We haven’t been given any indication that their relationship is in trouble to the point where he just wouldn’t show up. As to the claim that she’s “too much,” what the heck is that supposed to mean? Too much how? The woman we’ve been spending time with all evening is reasonably levelheaded. I suppose you could argue that both of these fears are meant to be groundless, but if that’s the case, it robs the moment of any sort of impact. Still more puzzling is a running joke that Linda wants Sammi to go to graduate school. Graduate school for what? And why? Is this just supposed to be a riff on stereotypes of the pushing Jewish mother? Also, given that Sammi is running a charter school, wouldn’t she have needed to go to graduate school for that kind of position anyway or at least seriously be entertaining the possibility on her own?
If the above seems like nitpicking…well, fair is fair, that’s because it is. But the play invites this kind of nitpicking. I could go on listing individual annoyances, but we’d be here all night. It’s particularly frustrating because I was a really big fan of Kaplan’s play The Villains’ Supper Club, presented by Merrimack Repertory Theatre a few years ago. There was a lot of goofy fun in that script in how it translated the world of comic books to the stage and I had a great time. Here, I was just frustrated. The play glides along on a certain level of mild humor until it slathers on a maudlin ending that you knew was coming but kind of hoped wouldn’t. I’m not against maudlin endings, but I want them earned. Director Melia Bensussen tries to make all of the elements flow together and there are certain moments when they do, but rough bits still stick out. A moment mid-show between Sammi and Esther that’s supposed to be physically aggressive, just comes off as awkward. Late in the show Beverly makes a move to leave the house, but two scenes later, she’s still sitting around the dinner table. So I guess she forgot to got?
There’s a great visual metaphor to be found in the set for We All Fall Down, (the design by Judy Gallen is a lovely recreation of a kitchen/dining room, though I’m not sure that it’s as utilitarian as it could/should be. The bathroom is placed in a spot that makes it look like part of the kitchen.). The back wall of the stage is plastered with hanging picture frames that lap over each other. When the stage lights come up and you can see them clearly, you realize that all of the frames are empty. The pictures that you’d expect to be there, detailing the family history, aren’t. By cutting off aspects of their Jewish identity, the Stein family is similarly without history and this Seder is their attempt to get it back. I’m not sure if they find it, but I do think that there’s something missing at the Stein household.
We All Fall Down is presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, January 10-February 16, 2020.
For tickets and more information, visit their website: www.huntingtontheatre.org
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