Housework

Comparisons of Brooke Allen’s new family drama to Steppenwolf’s August: Osage County are inevitable: It revolves around another delusional matriarch, employs the same forced-reunion recipe for old-wound exposition, and offers juicy turns to the lead and the actor playing her heir-apparent eldest daughter. Scaled down for relative means and experience, this black-box production compares pretty well, except in terms of script, where even with a handicap, August author Tracy Letts wins hands down.

While there was plenty about August to leave one skeptical, it packed (and unpacked) enough dirt for five plays (or horrible Thanksgivings) into one somehow plausible evening, and it gave a clinic in the essential artifice of verisimilitude, down to each familiar yet persuasive character and boiled-down yet organic conversation. By contrast, Housework is all too real, unfolding in dialogue that tends to make its point three times, then repeat a few scenes later. Its heartfelt conflicts and resolution are too simple, and small-scale, to justify its two and a half hours. Beleaguered mom Helen’s strengths and flaws are ambiguous and difficult to distinguish. In short, it’s more authentic and dramatically unshaped. There’s a compelling story about destructive nostalgia within, but like her pack-rat heroine, Allen needs to extricate herself from a lot of sentimental dead weight.

That said, both ensemble and messy-house set convince, and there’s some quality up-close acting going on. Freud and Incorvaia are engrossing as Helen and daughter Anne, respectively; Callahan makes a spot-on spoiled last-born; and Dowling’s ebullient walk-ons bring down the house.