The title makes us wary of all the Christmas cheer at the Dahl family gathering when Leslye Headland’s play begins: Everybody is singing Christmas carols in a home awash in Christmas decorations, with the father Bill (David Rasche) on piano; Mark (Zachary Quinto), the eldest of the family’s four adult children, on banjo; and mother Ginny (Mare Winningham) on guitar and leading the women’s verses, which alternate with the men’s.
Sure enough, it’s not long before we start learning not just about the friction in the family, but about the problems of each character one by one – ten in all.
Of course, the best-known Christmas stories, the ones that pop up annually on stage and screen — A Christmas Carol, It’s A Wonderful Life – are steeped in friction and misery, but their troubles serve as foreplay to a character’s ultimate redemption, resulting in a warm and happy ending.
There is no such clear resolution in “Cult of Love,” and no unambiguous message, although Mark gets a near-sermon towards the end that spells out a possible point to the play. If anything, despite the Christmas carols sung from beginning to end, the playwright seems intent on subverting the formula of the Christmas story. But she replaces it with another formula, that of the dysfunctional family drama. This genre at its best can generate shattering moments and fresh insights, and I kept on expecting “Cult of Love” to deliver them. This is thanks to the one undeniable strength of the production: the fine ensemble acting of the cast, six of whose ten members are making their Broadway debuts.
The four siblings and their partners have traveled for the annual Dahl family get-together on Christmas Eve at Bill and Ginny’s Connecticut farmhouse, and even while they spend much of their time singing together in a well-practiced harmony, the dissonance of their characters and their relationships surface regularly to serve as counterpoint.
Mark Dahl (Quinto) was going to be a priest, which is what his mother Ginny wanted, but became a lawyer instead. He is married to Rachel (Molly Bernard), who converted from Judaism. She is the wisecracker in the crowd, but her remarks come with a bitter edge; we soon learn that their marriage is ending.
Evie Dahl (Rebecca Henderson) is newly married to Pippa (Roberta Colindrez), and there is friction between Evie and the rest of the family – especially Ginny and Evie’s younger sister Diana –because of their religion-inspired attitudes towards Evie and Pippa’s relationship, and their sexuality. (As Pippa puts it about Diana: “she makes me feel bad about myself in the nicest way.” )
Diana (Shailene Woodley), the youngest of the Dahl siblings, is there with her minister husband James (Christopher Lowell) and their newborn (who is unseen upstairs , but plenty heard.) She is pregnant with her second child.
Johnny Dahl (Christopher Sears) is the only one of the siblings who hasn’t shown up when the play begins. Ginny insists on waiting to serve dinner until he arrives; which makes the rest of them hungry and resentful. This felt like a set-up to having his arrival kick into gear the dramatic action that would drive the rest of the play . And there is an expectant moment when he finally arrives in the house, pauses…and energetically leads the rest of the Dahls in song, playing his own guitar.
He’s arriving with a friend, Loren (Barbie Ferreira); they both turn out to be addicts in recovery, but little is made of this.
This is not the first moment that felt like a feint. Earlier, Evie confronts her siblings.
“My wife and I have been TRYING to talk about Dad for, like, a year and we’re gonna have to talk about it tonight.”
“Is Christmas really the best time for that?” Mark says.
“Christmas is exactly the time to talk about things we never talk about,” Evie says.
Bill, we learn, has Alzheimer’s. But if they have it out about him, I missed it. His is just another problem added to the pile.
Similarly, not much is made of the clues that Ginny was an overly protective mother, whose excessive caution (what she would call love) may have damaged her children, and that she is resolutely in denial about any and all problems they now face.
Perhaps this all sounds like an interweaving of subtle character studies from which an attentive theatergoer can piece together not just this particular family’s dynamics but a larger lesson about love.
Yet there is a melodramatic revelation about one of the characters late in the play that undermined this interpretation for me. To tell you any details would probably be a spoiler. So I’ll just say it was done so ham-handedly, so implausibly, it made me question whether all the seemingly meandering moments in “Cult of Love” really added up to an intentional design, or were more like random pieces for a jigsaw puzzle the playwright hadn’t fully pictured yet.
Perhaps we are meant to grasp the big picture of “Cult of Love” from a long monologue near the end, when Mark tells Loren that human beings have a biological need to love, but as we grow older, “no one seems like a proper receptacle for this pure love.” So we start loving things – money, sex, drugs. But, love, he says, is what God is for. “We’re designed to love God,” but it’s difficult to do so, because “human experience is one of such complicated smallness that choosing God is impossible. Being human is being heartbroken.”
“Cult of Love”, as I said, could not be mistaken for “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but this monologue is thought-provoking; there is even a certain cogency to it.
But then Mark segues into a fairly standard exegesis of Christian belief about God’s love, which I found confusing. If Mark is the playwright’s mouthpiece, why is she using the loaded word “cult” in the title?
Cult of Love
Second Stage’s Helen Hayes Theater through February 2
Running time: 100 minutes with no intermission.
Tickets: $91 – $262
Written by Leslye Headland
Directed by Trip Cullman
Scenic design by John Lee Beatty, costume design by Sophia Choi, lighting design by Heather Gilbert, and sound design by Darron L West. The Music Supervisor is Jacinth Greywoode.
Cast: Molly Bernard as Rachel, Roberta Colindrez as Pippa, Barbie Ferreira as Loren, Rebecca Henderson as Evie, Christopher Lowell as James Bennett, Zachary Quinto as Mark, David Rasche as Bill, Christopher Sears as Johnny, Mare Winningham as Ginny and Shailene Woodley as Diana
Photos by Joan Marcus
