Hell may be other people, but the most nefarious circle of Hades belongs to the neighbors who organize themselves into HOAs. David Lindsay-Abaire’s well-polished comedy The Balusters boasts plenty of curb appeal while delving into the bumptious personalities of a community association in an unnamed city seeking to protect the aesthetics (and resell value) of their historic homes. The nine members of the Vernon Point Neighborhood Association are a notably diverse lot, a reflection of the fact that they’re living in an unnamed city on blocks of Victorian houses that have a deeply suburban feel but are a pickleball’s throw from housing projects and less gentrified areas.
They’re also diverse only to a point. After all, they’re wealthy enough to own one of those fancy homes that local kids often stop and dream of owning one day (when they’re not occasionally boosting Amazon packages from the spacious front porches). They also seem to be mostly East Coast liberals of the sort who’d be willing to remain within the city limits and who doubtless make annual donations to the local NPR station. Most profess to be lifelong Democrats — including Elliot, the seventysomething realtor who has ruled the group for decades and seeks to preserve a version of the place as he remembers it from his childhood, with ice cream socials and classical music playing from open windows.
Richard Thomas perfectly portrays Elliot as the sort of eminently reasonable man who uses that reasonableness as a cudgel to get his way, whether by heading off challenges to his authority or by gatekeeping the look of the place. He’s sold most of his neighbors their home, after all. But Elliot meets his match in Kyra, a former corporate finance exec who’s moved into town with her attorney husband and their twin daughters (we never meet the three of them). As played with spiky energy by Anika Noni Rose, Kyra emerges as a millennial mirror image of Elliot — disguising a doggedness beneath a seemingly accommodating surface.
Lindsay-Adaire has great fun introducing the rest of the association while also telegraphing some of the conflicts that will upend the group by the final curtain. While Elliot fusses over the installation of a wheelchair ramp with historically inappropriate balusters, Kyra and others are concerned with all the cars speeding down their residential streets since a traffic light was installed a block away. True to form, Elliot dismisses the idea of adding stop signs on aesthetic grounds. But the play also seeds other conflicts into the mix: the unlocked back gate at the home of Brooks (Carl Clemons-Hopkins) and his husband and son; the baggies of dog poop left in the emptied trash bins of Melissa (Jeena Yi); and the intrusion of all those nonwhite kids from the surrounding area and what that might portend.
In a series of meetings inside Kyra’s tastefully decorated living room (beautifully designed by Derek McLane and lit by Allen Lee Hughes with occasional bursts of projected graffiti during scene changes), we watch as this mostly well-meaning bunch grapple with the changes in society mores in real time. The Latino contractor (Ricardo Chavira) bristles at the term Latin-X and other “retro woke bullshit;” the high school teacher (Michael Esper, nicely exasperated) gets flummoxed when his students accuse him of being “ableist” for calling a movie “lame;” the ultra-woke, vegan nepo baby (Kayli Carter, memorably hyper-sensitive) bursts into tears when confronted on trying to play savior for others; the brash, straight-talking widow (Margaret Colin, wonderfully sharp-tongued) defiantly wears fur and suggests the contractors’ workmen might be causing the uptick in crime. (Emilia Sosa’s costumes, which change multiple times between scenes, perfectly capture their individuality.)
The most brazen thief shuffles across the stage in the guise of 85-year-old Broadway legend Marylouise Burke, playing a sweet-natured seventysomething widow who is not quite as addled as the others suspect nor as easily manipulated. Like her character, Burke is a sly comedy assassin who defies expectations and hoards some of the show’s best punchlines. She’s packing more than just Werther’s Originals in the pockets of her cardigan. (If there’s any justice, the Tony nominators will recognize her — along with 96-year-old Marjorie Prime co-star June Squibb, and 80-year-old actors John Lithgow and André De Shields, for Giant and Cats: The Jellicle Ball.)
The only one immune from a takedown is Luz (Maria-Christina Oliveras), the housekeeper who had worked for Elliot for decades but has now turned up in Kyra’s home and hovers about the action with a watchful eye and an occasional telling aside. She’s the one who helps trigger the explosive final confrontation where the entire crew is taken down a baluster or two. It gets to the point where they begin demanding a reckoning for everybody. “Now someone do Kyra,” one of them says with glee in the midst of a comeuppance round robin that proves as cathartic as it is funny.
And it is fun to watch these characters, so quick to congratulate themselves on their goodness, come to terms with the ways in which they fall short of their noble ideals. Director Kenny Leon keeps a tight pace on the proceedings, though his staging can lack an imaginative flair or dynamism. The cast is mostly rooted to the sofa and chairs in a broad half oval around Kyra’s stylish living room carpet, as if they were repeatedly assembling for a group portrait, and even the climax occurs mostly upstage with an almost muted decorum.
The Balusters is the latest in a series of contemporary stage comedies that are less interested in traditional drawing rooms than in drawing blood — skewering the foibles and hypocrisies of progressive lefties who also happen to be theater’s most reliable ticket buyers. It doesn’t stray into over-the-top horror fantasy like Tracy Letts’s The Minutes or the extremes of cultural appropriation like Larissa Fasthorse’s Thanksgiving Play. Nor does it boast a show-stopping comedic detour like the suburban parents’ Zoom meeting from hell in Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day. Lindsay-Abaire’s play more closely resembles the century-old Victorians of Vernon Place, boasting a sturdy frame on which the first-rate cast can express themselves with great craftsmanship. It doesn’t seek to push the genre into bold, modern directions — no glass-walled modern extension, thank you — but to embrace the virtues of a well-constructed contemporary satire. A gut renovation isn’t needed. The Balusters has good bones. ★★★★☆
THE BALUSTERS
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, Broadway
Running time: 2 hours (with no intermission)
Tickets on sale through June 6 for $58 to $347