Misery springs eternal. We’ve seen dozens of fictional families clash be cause of a Big Traumatic Past Event, but that didn’t deter Jon Robin Baitz (“The Substance of Fire,” TV’s “Brothers and Sisters”) from adding another to the list.
We should count ourselves lucky he did — and in such a firecracker fashion, alternately poignant and caustic.
It helps considerably that this Lincoln Center production, directed by Joe Mantello, boasts a dream cast firing on all cylinders. It’s a thrill to watch the likes of Stockard Channing, Linda Lavin and Stacy Keach transcend the story’s more conventional aspects while filing its genuine insights into sharp edges.
Here, the trio play the older members of the Wyeth clan, bunkered down in an elegant, sand-colored Palm Springs, Calif., estate.
The owners are Polly (Channing) and her husband, Lyman (Keach), two staunch country-club Republicans. She’s trim, acerbic and perma-tanned; he’s a genial actor-turned-politician, in the Reagan mold.
Home for the holidays is their daughter, Brooke (the uncompromising Elizabeth Marvel, fresh from “The Little Foxes”), a newly single writer living alone in Sag Harbor as she re-emerges after a severe depression. Hovering on the periphery are Brooke’s younger, TV-producer brother, Trip (the deceptively carefree Thomas Sadoski), and Polly’s sister, Silda (Lavin), a recovering alcoholic who’s nearly destitute.
Tennis games and banter — “Funny is all we have left,” Trip remarks — can’t hide a simmering tension between daughter and parents. It bubbles over when Brooke reveals she’s about to publish a tell-all memoir exposing a family tragedy.
While the show follows a predictable arc from acidic comedy to teary melodrama, Baitz also defies conventional wisdom. He’s especially good at showing how people’s private behavior and political opinions can defy expectations. Brooke, the liberal lefty, is also a self-righteous jerk; the conservative parents she berates show kindness and courage.
Trip and Silda, who initially stand by the car crash, get sucked into it. They sometimes egg on, sometimes calm the adversaries while revealing troubles of their own.
In keeping with our kill-your-idols age, Baitz says that no one’s entirely good. What’s more interesting is that he acknowledges that no one’s entirely bad, either.