Polly Stenham’s “That Face” deals with unset tling emotional violence and pathologies. And it doesn’t introduce them gradually, either: The play jumps straight into the deep end of the pool. Enter at your own risk.
The show opens with a doozy of a scene. Looking demure in their school uniforms, Izzy (Betty Gilpin) and Mia (Cristin Milioti) are hovering above a younger classmate who’s tied to a chair and wearing a jerry-rigged hood. The two girls are indulging in the kind of hazing ritual that’s made English schools (in)famous. Except that their victim has passed out and isn’t waking up.
“It’s meant to be fun,” Izzy, a ruthless alpha female, bemoans. “For us.”
Stenham was only 19 when “That Face” was produced in London a couple of years ago. She has an instinctive grasp of the competitive, often harsh world of teens. But the rest of her overheated play proves she can also depict intensely screwed-up adults, and how they infect family dynamics.
Mia’s shenanigans get her in trouble with her school, but her mother, Martha (Laila Robins), is in no position to help. A virtual shut-in, she’s the proverbial mad, alcoholic woman in the attic. Only Mia’s 18-year-old brother, Henry (Christopher Abbott), who takes care of their mom, seems to keep it together.
Except that Henry and Martha share an unsettling intimacy, and you start wondering who’s enabling whom.
The absentee dad (Victor Slezak) comes back to sort things out, but he isn’t a knight in shining armor, either: Nobody gets away with anything here.
The show’s far from perfect: Stenham can awkwardly apportion blame and resort to obvious plot tricks — blame it on youth.
But there’s a real sensibility at work in “That Face,” and Stenham gets a sympathetic production from director Sarah Benson (who tackled Sarah Kane’s harrowing “Blasted” in 2008).
She airs out the writer’s claustrophobic world, and gets multifaceted takes on potentially irritating characters from her sympathetic cast.
Robins’ Martha may be destructive, but she can also be helpless and seductive at the same time. It’s easy to see how Abbott’s sensitive, passionate Henry could be pulled into her orbit, and equally easy to see how Milioti’s headstrong Mia could resist.
elisabeth.vincentelli@
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