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| ALL IN THE DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY: (left tor right) Keith Nobbs, Kevin Kilner, Kellie Overbey in Lanford Wilson's 'Lemon Sky.' Photo: Richard Termine |
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Theater
Review
Family ties bind & unravel in revival of Lanford Wilson's disturbing Lemon Sky
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By
Scott Harrah
This revival of the late Lanford Wilson’s 1970
Off-Broadway drama is often intense and, at least in the first act, compelling
and thoroughly engrossing. This story of 17-year-old Alan (Keith Nobbs,
recently seen on Broadway in Lombardi), a teen that leaves his native
Nebraska and heads to California to live with his father Douglas (Kevin
Kilner), stepmother Ronnie (Kellie Overbey, and siblings and foster kids in
suburban San Diego), begins as a lighthearted
story of a teenager reuniting with the father who walked out on him and his
mother at age five. However, the levity does not last long. The play starts out
like a happy tale of a boy seeking his father’s approval and a new life in a
warm climate, but the newfound family ties begin to unravel as Alan realizes
his father, two baby brothers (ages eight and 12), the foster kids and
stepmother all have copious baggage—and dark secrets.
Stories about family dysfunction are, in the 21st century, rather old hat, but
four decades ago it is easy to see why Lemon Sky appeared daring and
shocking. The show has all the elements
of classic melodrama: a son with ambiguous sexuality, an oversexed, tyrannical
father, impressionable children, drug and alcohol abuse, and financial woes.
Mr. Nobbs, as Alan, is outstanding, and manages to carry this intriguing but
flawed story by imbuing the character with the right mix of innocence and
adolescent frustration, and that is no easy task in a saga so overloaded with
turgid narrative twists. The story is supposedly set in both 1959 and
1970 in El Cajon, California, but it is sometimes confusing about which decade
we are actually seeing. Alan narrates throughout the play, speaking
directly to the audience, and then turns and talks to other characters.
While this may sound like a West Coast version of something by Tennessee
Williams—The Glass Menagerie comes to mind— it really is not, although
it is definitely a memory play. Mr. Wilson’s work is often compared to
Williams, but Lemon Sky owes a lot to the New Journalism of 1960s
Californiana. In particular, a long, poetic soliloquy in act two
(originally in act three in the 1970 production) seems as if it could be lifted
straight out of Joan Didion’s classic 1966 Saturday Evening Post article “Some
Dreamers of The Golden Dream,” about murder, extramarital affairs and drug abuse,
set in the arid, suburban hills of inland Southern California—a subtropical Shangri-La
mostly populated with middle-class Midwestern transplants, living on a fault
line in homes that were constantly threatened by wildfires caused by the Santa
Ana winds. The late Mr. Wilson, like Ms. Didion, depicts the inland areas
of Southern California as a mock Promised Land: sunny and beautiful on the
surface, but populated with as much human strife as any inner city on the East
Coast or in the austere, bleak Midwest.
Jonathan Silverman does his best to direct a play that is loaded with thematic
holes, but he needs to focus things more so what is supposed to be the past and
present is not so confusing. The
subplots revolving around foster kids Carol, a promiscuous, pill-popping teen
(Alyssa May Gold) and shy, withdrawn Penny (Amy Tedesco), allegations of
pedophilia, and other sensitive subject matter sometimes come across as
contrived sensationalism. Alyssa May Gold’s interpretation of Carol seems far
too modern, often portraying the character as a wisecracking, neurotic Valley
Girl from the 1980s. Amy Tedesco’s Penny is appropriately mousy, while
Kellie Overbey’s Ronnie is a plausible combination of an outgoing suburban
housewife trying to relate to the kids while maintaining a classic 1950s-style
veil of secrecy and denial about her husband’s sinister side. Kevin Kilner’s
Douglas, as the overbearing father, is sometimes too over-the-top and shrill,
and gets so caught up in the emotional delivery of his dialogue that he flubs
lines.
The final scene starts out heartbreaking and tragic, but Lanford Wilson
overloads the play’s last moments with so much gloom, anguish, and grief that
the end result descends into mawkish soap opera, leaving audiences ultimately
unsatisfied.
Published September 27, 2011
Reviewed at press performance on September 25, 2011
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