Susan Bennett, Todd Lawson, Tristan Colton, and Curzon Dobell.
Photo by Dixie Sheridan.
How often do you see a leading program credit for a master carpenter (Karl Allen)? How many times have you seen settings with doors that open to black nowhere? To another room? A hallway? The outdoors? Not there, not there, not there. How much harder, then, for audiences to accept what they see as real, even good, fake real? And actors? Transforming themselves from blackness backstage to real characters the moment they open the door? Not totally possible; frequently, the blackness comes on stage for a fleet but deadly instant. Hard on everybody.
Not in Levittown. Levittown’s setting is so real, if you walk from the living room occupying most of the stage, you’ll end up in the kitchen, complete with sink, fridge, dinette set, linoleum floor, counters, cereal boxes, the works, the whole kitchen. And behind the living room, from the kitchen is the hallway to the bedrooms. Set designer Michelle Spadaro has duplicated one of the 17,447 homes right down to the fixtures the Levitts built using scrap war materials and sold to returning WWII veterans for $7,990, quite a sum at the time. We’re in Edmund Maddigan’s home at play’s opening, it’s 1999 and Edmund’s grandson, Kevin Briggs (Tristan Colton) has just returned from his third try at college, here to stay a while with his mother, Kathleen (Deborah Tranelli) and sister, Colleen (Susan Bennett) who live with Grandpa Maddigan (Dane Knell). Kevin’s father, Richard Briggs (Curzon Dobell), long estranged from his family, lives on his own in an identical Levittown house and wants Kevin to stay with him, his dad, but Kevin makes excuses; he’s already in Uncle Jack’s old room in the upstairs which the Maddigans built, just as thousands of others had expanded their houses when families grew. We are beset with undercurrents from family travails.
Strongly as the setting and the title may impinge on first impressions, the play actually unfolds around one of the thousands of Levittown families and embraces us so quickly we scarcely give fleeting thought to any relationship to those other families. Playwright Marc Palmieri busies us with questions: why is the father of the family living on his own in another house? What ties Colleen into such knots? Why is Mom, Kathleen, channeling Buddhism instead of Catholicism? And is that a fireman’s helmet hanging over the mantel? Why? Whose? Palmieri expertly paces his revelations, but just as we are all but settled in the kind of dramatic story telling we find comfortably familiar, the playwright runs headlong into the playwright’s trap: trying to do too much, tell too much, set up too much, settle too much. His enactments of Grandfather Maddigan’s wartime reminiscences—paralleling the discovers Kevin finds as he rummages upstairs through old boxes -–are clumsy, not new, not revelations, most of all not germane to his central telling of a family trying to come to cases with its special – or is it? – torment, focused in father Richard’s twisted character.
Otherwise, Palmieri has written a play with genuine potential in the vein of Miller and Odets without the political, social implications, intensely personal instead. He has splendid support from director George Demas who pilots a disparate group of actors into a family, warts and all. Tristan Colton as Kevin, hungering to knit his family together, is quite wonderful. Curzon Dobell as his paranoid father creates a frighteningly believable man caught in the vise of his dementia. Together they make the most of playwright Palmieri’s still developing confrontation between them, the crux of the play. The rest of the cast, Susan Bennett, Todd Lawson, Dane Knell, Tyler Pierce and Deborah Tranelli, are excellent. As for Levittown itself, how many other stories…
Theater At St. Clement’s, 423 West 46th Street. Tickets: $25. Wed-Sat, 8 pm, Sun 5 pm. 212-352-3101 or cliplighttheater.com.