It may sound like faint praise to lead with compliments on the tech work, but the (uncredited) hair design for The Lyons is quite impressive. The razor-cut bob sported by Rita (Naomi Jacobson), bleached with the roots long grown out, tells us a lot about this grasping, reality-denying soon-to-be widow who bemoans the upholstery in her home as a “washed out shade of dashed hopes.” Her lonely, sad, self-destructive son Curtis (Marcus Kyd) wears a gravity-proof Tintin foreshock that is perhaps his most endearing quality.
Nicky Silver’s powers of invention in the realm of acidulated comedies of broken families are still strong. Granted, John Lescault’s dying patriarch Ben, confined to a hospital bed for the entirety of act 1, doesn’t get to do much but make up for the lifetime of swear words he’s never uttered until now. But director John Vreeke gives him a delicious slow comic take in reaction to a piece of deadly information revealed: who knew that a bed elevator could be funny?
Vreeke also gives Kimberly Gilbert’s Lisa (Ben and Rita’s other child) the time to let us see how shaken she is by her father’s imminent passing. In a monologue not always performed, done as an entr’acte under the house lights at the lip of the stage, Gilbert attends an AA meeting and receives the audience’s greeting. When the ultimate telephone call interrupts her story, her crushed, silent reaction is show-stopping.
- The Lyons, by Nicky Silver, directed by John Vreeke, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.