Nicky Silver’s new comedy recapitulates many of his favorite themes: dealing with an overly controlling parent, self-medicating with food, discovering one’s true sexual orientation—whether this be “discovering” in the sense of finding or revealing. Audience favorite Linda Lavin appears in the role of Audrey Langham, a long-in-the-tooth veteran of the regional theater circuit who perhaps is ready to hang up her traveling shoes. Audrey’s retirement is at the expense of her daughter Kitty (Jennifer Westfeldt) and son-in-law Dennis (Ken Barnett), who are working through their own life crises during their annual getaway to their Long Island summer home. There’s a nice whiff of Blanche Dubois and Mitch in the relationship between the serially-married Audrey and the bemused neighbor Winston (the resourceful Richard Bekins). Of the relationships between the six characters of the play that unfurl, the one between Audrey and Winston is the most interesting, and sweet, and well played—and yet its resolution is the most unconventional.
Lavin has a deep toolbox of microexpressions that she puts to comic use during a fraught technical rehearsal of Medea that has her at wit’s end. And she shows us a lovely singing voice in a run-through of Weill and Brecht’s “Surabaya Johnny” that she alternately plays straight and for laughs.
- Too Much Sun, by Nicky Silver, directed by Mark Brokaw, Vineyard Theater, New York