Alexandra is 79 and angry — growing old is no picnic, plus she’s afraid of being kicked out of her Park Slope brownstone. So she barricades herself in her home, surrounded by dozens of homemade Molotov cocktails.
Eric Coble’s new Broadway play consists of the negotiation between Alexandra (Estelle Parsons, spry at 86) and her son Chris (Stephen Spinella), an aging hippie in an unfortunate ponytail and mustache who’s trying to end the standoff.
There’s zero suspense as to whether our gray panther will blow up her prized piece of real estate, because Coble and director Molly Smith are more interested in the bickering between mother and son. If only we felt the same.
Chris hasn’t seen his painter mom in years and at first she seems to despise him. The reason for their estrangement is vague, especially since the two seem to have a lot in common: Chris was the kind of kid who dressed up as “the embodiment of Infinity” for Halloween, then became an artist — exactly the kind of stuff you’d think Alexandra would appreciate.
Their dispute feels motivated solely by a playwright’s need to cook up a conflict, followed, of course, by a reconciliation. Fight, then catharsis — the show stays within safe guidelines.
More interesting is the thread about the indignity of aging: Alexandra often struggles for words and can’t even hold a pencil anymore. After hearing a knee pop as she tries to get up from her chair, she quips, “That’s how you know you’re getting old, when you start making sound effects for your body.”
Alexandra stands in sharp, if overly neat contrast to Spinella’s mellow Chris, a soft-spoken soul on the threshold of loserdom.
Both actors are perfectly fine, but watching them duke it out is only mildly entertaining — the play’s brushstrokes are too broad to paint a compelling portrait.