“The Substance of Fire” is two plays for the price of one: Each act is almost self-contained. Too bad the first is much better than the second — at least in Trip Cullman’s lopsided revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s family drama.
We’re in 1987 and Isaac Geldhart’s publishing house is on the brink of bankruptcy, thanks to his predilection for such doomed titles as “An Atlas of the Holocaust” or “Water on Fire, an Oral History of the Children of Hiroshima.”
There’s a pattern: Isaac (John Noble, “Fringe” and “Sleepy Hollow”) was a child during the Holocaust and is wracked by survivor’s guilt.
Yet his past hasn’t made him any kinder to his own children, shareholders in the company whom he constantly belittles. His younger son Aaron (Carter Hudson) has an MBA, but Isaac calls him “an accountant,” while the eldest, Martin (Daniel Eric Gold), who teaches landscape architecture, is derided as a “gardener’s apprentice.”
As for the middle child, Sarah (a sweetly sardonic Halley Feiffer), an actress on a children’s TV show, she’s a “clown for hire.”
Alliances shift as the quartet debates how to save the company. Aaron wants to publish a moneymaking commercial novel, while Isaac insists on an epic study of Nazi medical experiments.
Baitz went on to explore parents and children and the need to exorcise the past in his vastly superior “Other Desert Cities.” Still, this show starts off well, and is even suspenseful in the way it reveals how Isaac’s intransigence messed up his offspring.
Yet that story line is abandoned in the second act, which takes place three and a half years later.
Isaac, forced from the publishing house, now spends his days in his apartment, going crazy. Just how crazy is up to Marge (Charlayne Woodard), a social worker summoned for “competency proceedings,” to decide.
She doesn’t seem in any hurry to get to her questionnaire, though, and it emerges that she and Isaac share a past.
But the pair’s bond feels forced, and the actors aren’t on the same page: Noble swiftly transitions from tyrannical to vulnerable, but Woodard’s oddly mannered performance doesn’t make for a good match. After the original bonfire, we’re left with barely flickering embers.