Review of 'Beautiful Child' at the Vineyard Theatre

Perhaps my reaction to Nicky Silver's Beautiful Child would be more positive if I didn't watch it from the same seat where only a few months ago I winced through parts of Paula Vogel's The Long Christmas Ride Home.

In back-to-back productions, the Vineyard Theatre has delivered a portrait of a couple's precarious marriage and their children's tormented adulthoods with unblinking starkness and occasionally stomach-churning candor.

Like Silver's earlier Vineyard hits Pterodactyls and Raised in Captivity, Beautiful Child mixes comedy and drama, offering quippy dialogue one moment, a wrenching confessional the next. But the laughs do little to leaven the tone of the play, and its overarching pessimism dampens enthusiasm for such admirable aspects as the set, costumes and acting.

 

 

 

The play also bears a whiff of redundancy, as it looks and sounds a lot like Edward Albee's 2002 Tony winner The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?: In an affluent family with a gay son, someone has a controversial object of affection. There's also a fashionable living-room set and a gory (offstage) "solution" to the problem, just like The Goat had, and Silver has said—as Albee did—that his play questions our inacceptance of "immoral" love. (Meanwhile, the booze-fueled spousal spats recall Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, whose original Nick, George Grizzard, plays the father here.)

As Silver and other contemporary playwrights push boundaries and buttons in their dissecting of familial malaise, there doesn't always seem to be a point to all the ugliness. Beautiful Child revolves around not only the son's objectionable romance but also his parents' reexamination of their marriage, the interjections of his childhood psychiatrist, a tragedy involving a former student, and the identity crisis of his father's mistress/secretary. This may be an interesting way to tell a story, but it doesn't necessarily produce a coherent, affecting message.

Since Silver has always dealt with both the kinder and darker sides of human nature, Beautiful Child will not be a drastic shift for his Vineyard fans, who no doubt are welcoming his return after four years. Other talent involved in the show is a draw as well: It's directed by Terry Kinney, cofounder of Steppenwolf Theatre (and, in recent years, TV star via the HBO series Oz). Stage vet Penny Fuller partners with Grizzard as the parents, and Steven Pasquale—lauded for Lincoln Center's 2002 musical A Man of No Importance—plays the son, Isaac. Their performances are excellent. Completing the cast are Alexandra Gersten Vassilaros, whose ramblings as the fluttery mistress will either amuse or irritate you, and Kaitlin Hopkins, in a dual role.

Beautiful Child runs through March 28 at the Vineyard Theatre, 108 E. 15th St.; call 212-353-0303 for tickets.

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