Despite a strong cast and fantastic staging, Alexis Zegerman’s saga of a brutally dysfunctional extended New York family only periodically impresses.
25 March 2022
Thrice-married Professor Richard Myers (unevenly played by the usually watchable Robert Lindsay) is one of the founding fathers of IVF. He is also bullying father to three of his own variously tormented adult children. The surgeon hands that once brought his own and dozens of other babies into life are crippled with Parkinson’s. The ghost of an unknown teenage girl plagues his waking hours, and he is slowly and painfully dying
The professor’s peers have nominated him for a lifetime achievement award and so his extended family gather the day before the ceremony to celebrate his triumph and prepare for his passing. As family enigmas are revealed, long-submerged filial anger erupts, fractured relationships are put to the test, and we ask ourselves is ‘does this man really deserve an award for anything?’
As a dramatic premise for a plot, Alexis Zegerman’s tale has plenty of potential and it is certainly aided by magnificent staging. Lizzie Clachan’s set design is a gorgeous confection of guilt-edged picture frames, set behind the family living room (perfectly lit by Matt Haskin’s exquisite cerulean lighting palette). Each frame reveals the happenings in different corners of the professor’s palatial, but now rapidly dilapidating New York brownstone. The action switches at pace between frames, floors, and foreground, and when it works the effect is electric.
Electric does not, however, describe the pace of storytelling. The first time we meet him, the professor complains that the brownstone’s stairlift, expensively installed by tech-entrepreneur son Anthony, “takes the gestation period of an elephant” to travel between floors. The same has to be said of the action, although the first half is zippier than the second.
Wizz-kid Anthony’s investment skills are not what they are cracked up to be and he has a suspiciously affectionate relationship with stepmom Megan (wonderfully played by a wearily put-upon Alexandra Gilbreath). Anthony’s twin brother Thomas arrives with lover Jake in tow, which is not guaranteed to impress homophobic dad. Dot, half-sister to the twins, mother to a sickly teenager, and wife to a plagiarising scientist Nat (or Gnat to the professor), want her fair share of the professor’s inheritance. Oh yes, and did I mention the ghost?
The main problem here is that there is so much going on, in so many different places, that it is hard to keep up. At one level the play is about IVF and what the professor’s research meant for him as a father and for society as a whole. At another level it is about how children deal with the genetic and emotion baggage inherited from parents. But the plot is so convoluted and takes so long to unravel (2 hours 55 minutes according to my watch), that these genuinely interesting themes never really get a chance to be aired.
Duration: 2 hours 55 mins in the performance I attended. One interval.
Writer: Alexis Zegerman
Director: Roxana Silbert
DOROTHEA MYERS-COOPER (DOT): LISA DILLON
PHILLIP TENNYSON: JAKE FAIRBROTHER
MEGAN MYERS: ALEXANDRA GILBREATH
PROF. RICHARD MYERS: ROBERT LINDSAY
ANTHONY MYERS: SAM MARKS
NATHANIEL COOPER (NATE): BO PORAJ
THOMAS MYERS: ALEX WALDMANN
Full Disclosure: I paid full box-office price for the ticket. I attended a preview.
