Feast

Aline Lathrop’s new play is constantly telling us how eccentric its family is. The mom, Christine, is kinda batty from a husband she lost (or did she?) 24 years ago. The good businessman son, Billy, is kinda too answerable to Mom; the bad artsy daughter, Jen, is kinda too sexed-up. Are they really as odd as Lathrop makes them out to be? Not even kinda. In fact, the unappetizing Feast serves up a full menu of theatrical clichés. A family has suffered a loss; the truth behind that loss comes out at the end. During a holiday weekend (that’s when families are at their nuttiest), outsiders—Billy’s new bride, Nina, and Christine’s colleague and crush, Mack—help prompt a final reckoning, leading to a quick and tidy resolution. A writer more skilled at on-the-ground, believably moment-to-moment dialogue could revive such limp domestic-drama conventions. But for Lathrop, capital-L Loss is something not so much to represent as to neatly overcome.

Senior and her cast do little to make this bland Feast more palatable (or, by the same token, less so). As Christine, Marguerite Hammersley suffers most from the script’s weaknesses. The loose-screw Christine is supposedly on the knife-edge of a breakdown, but with a stale plot and half-baked characterization, Lathrop offers Hammersley no edge on which to stand. With characters too busy serving their author’s pedestrian intentions to lead lives of their own, Feast leaves a hankering for a substantial meal, or at least something with a little flavor.—Novid Parsi