All dysfunctional families are alike, except for all of their differences. For the Dahls, the clan at the center of Leslye Headland’s fractious family-reunion drama Cult of Love, there’s a layer of religiosity and mental illness that the parents have passed down to their four now-grown children that manifests itself in ways that nobody knows quite know how to address.
Denial is a river that runs deep for the family matriarch, Ginny (Mare Winningham, convincingly understated) — who refuses to acknowledge, or seek treatment for, the increasing signs of dementia in her husband, Bill (David Rasche, beguiling in his earnest bewilderment), and barely registers the presence of her daughter Evie’s (Rebecca Henderson) wife of just under a year (Roberta Colindrez). Ginny is the sort of woman who chastises her grown kids over foul language and tries to bully/guilt them into following her whims (“You’re being so unloving right now”).
The kids, naturally, are a mess — a state that seems to be exacerbated by the stress of getting back together for Christmas Eve in the well-appointed Connecticut house where they grew up (designed by John Lee Beatty). Zachary Quinto’s Mark, the eldest, has the makings of an overachieving intellectual who gets stuck in his head too much of the time. He left the seminary to become a lawyer and is now clerking for the Supreme Court, but he seems adrift career-wise and is secretly separated from his wife of a decade (Molly Bernard) after a series of miscarriages.
Then there’s Evie, worried about her dad and bristling at the barely disguised homophobia of her mother and younger sister, Diana (Shailene Woodley). Diana, who’s moved back home with her folks while nursing her newborn and expecting her second child, has become a religious zealot decrying Eve’s “life choices” and Mark’s abandonment of the church — all with the support of her husband (Christopher Lowell, perfectly priggish), an Episcopalian priest who’s been booted out of his church position because of her outbursts. And let’s not forget the lovable scamp Johnny (Christopher Sears), a recovering drug addict who turns up late to Christmas Eve dinner with another addict he’s been sponsoring (Barbie Ferreira). (“Johnny is not a drug addict,” Ginny insists to Pippa before his arrival.) Perhaps because he’s drifted the farthest from the family’s gravitational orbit, he’s mostly indulged by the others for his puckish personality.
That’s a lot to unpack in a one-act play that runs under two hours, and Headland neglects to give us a single character to focus on for long enough that we get a deep sense of what drives any of them. Quinto, who seems ill at ease throughout, gets the big 11 o’clock speech, a monologue about why Mark is still drawn to the message of Christianity even though he’s not quite ready to fully plunge into actual belief. Evie emerges as the designated if reluctant care-giver, recognizing the need to step in and assist her parents even if they’re not yet ready to actually accept any help. Henderson nails the character’s conflicted feelings of responsibility and frustration, as well as the ways in which the slights against her and Pippa rankle all the more deeply because of her commitment to make things better.
The biggest enigma here is Ginny, whose complicated relationship with her children seems to push them away and pull them back with a gravitational force that defies reason. (“You haven’t called me in eight months,” she tells Johnny at one point. “How did I make you come back?”) Aside from a long early speech explaining her overprotective instincts — she refused to let her kids go on sleepovers outside her own house when they were growing up — she emerges as more of an avatar of old-fashioned motherhood than a flesh-and-blood character. (In that speech about sleepovers, she also mentions being motivated by fears of “molestation” that we expect will resurface in some big revelation — but that proves to be a Rudolph-nose-red herring instead.) Headland, who’s described the play as semiautobiographical, seems reluctant to probe too deeply into this woman — so we’re served up contradictions instead instead of characterization.
The bigger bait-and-switch comes with Diana, whom Woodley plays with a committed stridency that never dips into caricature. The reasons for her hyper-religiosity only become clear two-thirds of the way into the drama — with a showy breakdown that upends how the characters (and we, the audience) are meant to respond to her. Until that moment and its aftermath, there have been no real hints of any mitigating factors that would pin a more sympathetic spin on her frankly obnoxious behavior. She’s been so awful for so much of the show, and her awfulness tolerated or abetted by her mother and husband, that the sudden shift in our perspective does little to damper our repulsion.
That discomfort is reinforced by the show’s three female outsiders, the plus-ones of the Dahl siblings, who each offer dramatic eye-rolls at the various outrages and deliver pearls of wisdom that cut through the worst of the family mythologizing. (The wryly acerbic Bernard and the take-no-guff millennial Ferreira stand out in particular.) Like us, they marvel at what magnetic force draws these siblings back to home base year after year.
It might have something to do with music. The show features multiple songs, frankly too many, in which the family harmonizes together on classic carols and folk tunes like “Shenandoah” while whipping out an endless stash of instruments, from guitar to banjo to ukulele to tambourine to mouth organ. The cast’s actual musicianship varies considerably, but you do get the sense of a family that’s most at home when they are making music together — not unlike the sisters in Jez Butterworth’s The Hills of California a few blocks away on Broadway. They can’t resist an opportunity to break into song, or to gulling even reluctant bystanders like Rachel and Pippa into joining in. It’s as if they need a common project, one where there differences are channeled to a real purpose, in order to feel a real sense of connection.
Director Trip Cullman orchestrates some nice moments throughout, assisted by the sometimes cinematic lighting by Heather Gilbert in quieter night-time tableaux. But Headland’s writing lets him down in some of the more explosive scenes, where characters devolve into shouting obscenities (“Shut the fuck up!”) rather than arguing in ways that deepen our understanding of these characters or their backstories. We’ve seen reunions like this before, in tighter, better-written shows like Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate. All too often here, though, we’re stuck in an in-between world that neither quite grounded in comedy or tragedy — a liminal space like the wardrobe through which you enter Narnia (a magical land that the Dahl family members invoke more than once).
CULT OF LOVE
Hayes Theater, Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through February 2