Dysfunctional families have been the go-to meat of theatrical drama since Sophocles’ tale of Oedipus and his mom and dad. They were well followed by Lillian Hellman’s Hubbard clan, Arthur Miller’s Loman family, Eugene O’Neill’s Tyrones all the way up to Tracey Letts’ Westons. Dysfunctional families have figured in a lot of the plays I have reviewed year after year. And playwrights are always adding new ones.
Andy Robinson
The first show of 2024 that I have seen is the World Premiere of Sukkot by Matthew Leavitt, produced by The 6th ACT at the Skylight Theatre in Los Feliz, contains the newest group of misfit relatives. The Sullivans are a hybrid with an Irish father and a Jewish mother. That makes the children Jewish by custom if not in practice. Patrick (Andy Robinson) is still grieving deeply for his wife of 50-plus years who died a long and miserable death from breast cancer a year earlier. When talking to the rabbi who will oversee the unveiling of the tombstone, Patrick learns it will be taking place on the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. That is the one Jewish holiday when God asks the Jews to rejoice.
Liza Seneca
Patrick grasps on to this idea 110%. He binds together the branches of lulav, hadass and aravah and practices the complicated ceremony of waving them and the etrog (Jewish lemon). He builds a makeshift sukkah (nomadic hut) in his backyard where he plans on spending the next seven days eating, sleeping and talking with his three disparate children. Luckily his sukkah is in weather friendly Marin County in the Fall.
Natalie Lander
His children want nothing to do with the outdoor camping, preferring their old bedrooms. Asher (Jonathan Slavin) is the first to arrive, failure fairly dripping off him. He was fired from his teaching position at a college, had his gay lover leave him, and tended his sick mother during her final year. For the past six months he has been freeloading off Dad and has no reason to make other plans. Mairead (Liza Seneca) is a married gynecologist with two small sons, whose wakeful nights keep her frazzled. Eden (Natalie Lander) is the youngest, a free-spirited hippie-type nearing 40 with no marriage prospects who spends her time developing apps that never seem to come to fruition, even with her sister’s cash backing.
Jonathan Slavin
Leavitt’s script does provide plenty of laughs and this quartet, under the direction of Joel Zwick, delivers them solidly. But the script falls back on the usual tropes of the dysfunctional family. The one thing that sets it apart and makes its 100 intermission less minutes interesting is the Sukkot trivia. This mismatched foursome finally does some family rejoicing just before the lights dim for the last time.
https://the6thact.ludus.com/