‘Cult of Love’ traps you in a hellish family holiday reunion (Broadway review)
6 / 10
Director Trip Cullman orchestrates some nice moments throughout, assisted by the sometimes cinematic lighting by Heather Gilbert in quieter night-time tableaux. But Headland’s writing lets him down in some of the more explosive scenes, where characters devolve into shouting obscenities (“Shut the fuck up!”) rather than arguing in ways that deepen our understanding of these characters or their backstories. We’ve seen reunions like this before, in tighter, better-written shows like Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate. All too often here, though, we’re stuck in an in-between world that neither quite grounded in comedy or tragedy — a liminal space like the wardrobe through which you enter Narnia (a magical land that the Dahl family members invoke more than once).
