Sandoval

Typical, plucky girl heroine Darby Burnham indulges in typical, plucky girl-heroine activities. She has food fights with her lanky older brother. She holds funerals for dead animals with her misfit male buddy. She plays by her lonesome, narrating to no one in particular and without exhaustion her exhausting fantasy adventures that take place on her made-up utopian island.

She does these things, we can only assume, because her father is busy beating the living crap out of the entire family. Given that Darby is the character through whose eyes we see the bloody Burnham household, and given that the use of a Scout-ish tomboy as a story’s conscience has been done to death, it would be nice to report that, in addition to echoing scrappy adolescent heroines who came before her, Darby had something new (or even likable) to recommend her. Unfortunately, even though pint-size, raspy-voiced Lydia Day gives the part her all, playwright Thomas only gives her his sorta.

Thomas’s look at domestic violence is admirably straightforward; there’s no gimmickry in his depiction of a terrifyingly cruel patriarch and the wife and two kids he beats senseless. But even though Cooper’s actors—most new to me—live comfortably and unpretentiously in this glum world, the script’s vagueness makes you wonder why such lavish efforts were expended on undistinguished material. (A massive, literal scenic concept painstakingly lays out a kitchen, porch and a huge yard.) Trevor Luce has skillfully choreographed some shocking violence in the play’s climax, but you remember it less than the fact that it comes out of nowhere and ends too abruptly to resonate.