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Past Reviews Off Broadway Reviews |
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The 75-minute work, directed by Kira Simring, seems at first to be about the trials and tribulations of the kind of dysfunctional family that is common theatrical fodder: a middle-aged couple, Henry (Larry Cahn) and Anna (Deborah Offner) who barely communicate, and their surly teenaged son, Jude (Adam Weppler). Henry's favorite activity is dozing in front of the television, and Jude mopes around, occasionally picking up a guitar and strumming a few chords. Only upbeat and quirky Anna makes an effort to keep things moving against the rising tide of inertia that threatens to drown all of them within their roach-infested suburban enclave during the Christmas season. When we first meet Anna, a fading hippie-type with a lingering adoration of all things related to the Beatles, she is trying to engage her unresponsive husband in conversation, or at least get him to help her with the Christmas decorations. But she quickly gives it up as a wasted effort, throws a pillow onto the floor, kneels, and begins a self-invented rite that combines elements of Eastern meditation and Catholic prayer. Soon, however, she is interrupted by the play's fourth character, a nonexistent but persistent presence called Anna 2 (Catherine Dupont), representing the mostly negative voices from Anna's past that continue to haunt her. Those voices, echoing Anna's own dysfunctional family history, become more insistent as the play unfolds, until she confesses, "I think about death every day of my life." Gradually, we come to realize that this family is in serious trouble. Not the kind that reveals itself in explosive moments (as in, say, August: Osage County or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), but the kind that creeps along slowly and worsens with the passage of time. There is, we learn, a quite legitimate cause for Henry's disappearing into himself, just as there are a whole lot of very good reasons why Anna surrounds herself with rituals of faith and denial. Their son can only look on, powerless as any 18-year-old is to rescue his family or to save himself from falling into the same abyss. The cast as a whole does solid work in telling this sad tale, but it is Deborah Offner, with acting credits going back to the 1968 Broadway production of Hair, who is at the center of the production. She takes Anna on a journey from a seemingly sitcom post-hippie eccentric type to a surprisingly strong keeper-of-the-faith who is doing her utmost to keep things together for herself, her lost husband, and her unhappy son, despite living in a universe where she is constantly gnawed at by doubts and a growing understanding that, as she puts it, "maybe God is a jester." As it turns out, there is a significant non-Beatles reason why Jude has his name, for his family is nearly a lost cause that could do with the intervention of St. Jude, the patron saint of desperate cases.
Hey Jude
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