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Prodigal sons
Pterodactyls; Yellow Ribbons
BY LIZA WEISSTUCH
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In the title fight for dysfunctional family, the Duncans of Nicky Silver’s 1993 Pterodactyls could knock out the Wingfields or the Tyrones with a swift one-two. The play, which is receiving a sharp production by the Tribe Theatre Wing at Devanaughn Theatre (through July 24), is about denial. Dad is an emotionally defunct cheat. Mom’s a superficial socialite and heavy boozer with an unnatural love for her son. Todd’s homecoming, following a long absence, plants a seed of reality when he reveals he’s HIV-positive. His return also coincides with his sister Emma’s wedding to an awkward waiter she barely knows. Orphan Tommy tolerates her psychosomatic illnesses, the effect of abuse by Dad, who laughs off any suggestion of wrongdoing. The family takes to Tommy: Mom conscripts him as a maid, and Todd seduces him to tragic effect. Stephen Haley handles the script’s sudden transitions from Archie Bunker–esque comedy to bleak realism to Strindbergian dreamscape, and he’s assembled a fine cast. Gregory Moss is a sharp-tongued Todd whose masochistic pathology is perceptible beneath his acid attitude. Sarah Huling’s Emma is the romantic hysteric who puts her damaged emotional goods on full display. Bonnie-Jean Wilbur gives Mom’s overblown, nattering showiness a crumble-at-the-slightest-touch core. In that it conveys the play’s absurdity without crossing into slapstick, the production overcomes Silver’s attempt to link the dinosaurs’ extinction to the family’s decay. Todd finds dinosaur bones in the back yard, and he proceeds to assemble them in the living room as a weird avoidance tactic. (Credit set designer James Atkins for a bold staging of this within the Devanaughn’s confines.) Still, rather than breaking the rhythm of the play, the soliloquies in which Todd sermonizes on the Mesozoic era serve as palate cleansers that aid digestion of the proceedings. Impending marriage given a shake-up by the return of the a prodigal son is a running theme this summer. Another crumbling family duke it out in 11:11 Theatre Company’s Yellow Ribbons (at Actors Workshop through July 23), a new work by artistic director Brian Tuttle, who also plays Bryce, the runaway misfit who returns to Saratoga on the eve of his brother Dom’s wedding to Marilyn. There for the wedding, and desperate for Bryce to appear, is his girlfriend Ashley, a quixotic but rough-edged teen who lives for nothing else. The same holds for brother’s keeper Dom. The siblings’ troubled upbringing, related as strained melodrama, accounts for the extremes to which Dom goes to protect Bryce. Under David Gothard’s choppy direction, the motley crew held my interest for the first act. The second act spins out of control, becoming an orgy of shrieks interrupted by stalls. It’s as if Tuttle couldn’t decide whether to go the sepia-tinged sentimentality route or the bumpier road of Sam Shepard.
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