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Escape from Happiness
Your tolerance for Escape from Happiness will depend entirely on your ceiling for whimsy. Canadian scribe Walker’s 1991 play is populated with the family that was too weird for August: Osage County. The mom’s a psychobabble-spouting twit with a grin like Mrs. Voorhees, the three daughters are escalating illustrations of manic self-involvement, everyone else is probably a criminal, and all are cracking wise about the heart. This is a universe in which the logical way to deal with an injured man is to order him to slow dance.
We’re willing to believe that within Walker’s script there exists a funny and fun black comedy, but Infamous Commonwealth hasn’t found it. Veering from farce to tragedy to sitcom to melodrama without taking a breath to clarify the batshit crime plot, Thompson delivers a tone-deaf, dull and frequently incomprehensible evening.
The production isn’t wholly without joy. Katherine Arfkin’s set nails the look of every suburban kitchen from which high schoolers sneak Oreos and booze. Jim Farrell turns in his usual strong work as a patriarch, apparently having a blast merging faux-senility and craftiness, while Nancy Friedrich makes middle-child Mary Ann a hilarious, lisping Gollum. Almost every cast member finds a few bits of sharp timing, but these moments come off like tiny, heartbreaking rebellions on the train ride to Walker’s quirk gulag.
