Review - Blood From A Stone

First-time playwright Tommy Nohilly seems intent on ramming edgy family dysfunctions in the audience's faces with Blood From A Stone. Unfortunately there's no play underneath to support it all. Director Scott Elliott and The New Group do a heck of a good job covering up the flaws of the text most of the time, but the nearly three hours of animosity and head-banging symbolism can't help looking very silly now and then, despite the skilled ensemble.

Ethan Hawke, playing the central role, deserves high praise for keeping the evening grounded in some form of reality. Set in the recent past in the crumbling home of a blue-collar Connecticut family, Hawke is Travis, a war vet and pill addict who has come by for a Christmastime visit before heading west to figure out a new life. The play is more-or-less plotless, with Travis having at least one full scene alone with each character as family foibles are revealed.

Ann Dowd, as his mother, Margaret, squeezes empathy out of her role; harshly verbally abusive to her husband, Bill (Gordon Clapp), and clinging to Travis for compassion. One of her complaints against Bill is that he refuses to fix their leaky kitchen ceiling, panels of which occasionally drop to the floor. As Bill, Clapp is a brutish lug who mumbles when he doesn't bellow. A major problem with the play is that we never see anything to suggest this was ever anything more than a hateful pair and when their anger flies over the top, even with these two fine actors, the moments feel more scripted than organic.

Thomas Guiry is all meek and baby-faced as younger brother Matt, who has left his wife and kid for a married woman and is trying to pay off his gambling debts by selling stolen goods. A scene where Travis tries to get him to surrender to police waiting outside the door before they come in and arrest him will lack any tension for audience members who have read the program and know that there will be no other characters appearing.

Margaret, Bill and Matt all seem defined by their flaws, giving the audience little to care about. The only reasonable well-adjusted family member is Travis' sister Sarah (Natasha Lyonne), who keeps herself distant from the domestic conflicts. The playwright keeps himself distant from Sarah as well, as the character is introduced and soon forgotten. Also seen too briefly is the excellent Daphne Rubin-Vega as his ex, the now unhappily married Yvette. Their post-coital reunion scene, where they evaluate where their lives have gone, contains the play's best writing and is superbly acted. Although, accepting that Yvette is afraid she's no longer sexually attractive, after watching the scantily-clad Ms. Rubin-Vega parading her exceptional figure about the room, does require some suspension of disbelief.

Photo of Ann Dowd and Ethan Hawke by Monique Carboni.

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The central figure of Diana Amsterdam's tragedy of manners is a young, terminally ill accountant named Paul (Ted Caine) who spends most of the evening silently lying in a hospital bed surrounded by a carnival of denial. Unable to communicate, it's unclear how much of his wife, Sheila's (Christine Rowan), mask of perkiness he must endure as she forces positive energy into the room with plans for their future and uses an annoyingly motherly tone to praise the fact that he ate a whole half a banana today and kept it all down.

Her antics are all rather distasteful to Paul's co-worker Kate (Danni Simon) who comes for a visit and, sounding like the voice of the playwright, insists that Sheila but blunt with Paul about the fact that he is dying.

Their scenes in Carnival Round The Central Figure alternate with snippets from a televised gospel program, Speak Straight to Jesus, that features a fanatically energetic evangelist (Shane LeCocq), backed up by a frenzied choir, reminding us that death is simply the passing from this world into the next.

While Amsterdam offers a promising set-up, the playwright never goes much beyond stating the fact that people generally don't like to talk openly about death. At times she even appears critical of faiths that comfort their followers with the promise of an afterlife.

But while the text is too simple and repetitive, director Karen Kohlhaas' production for IRT keeps the evening visually interesting. The modest space is decorated with posters depicting a Mardi Gras skull and strings of light from above suggest we're seated under a carnival tent with an imposing nurse, who occasionally sucks blood out of Paul with an enormous syringe, seated throne-like on a raised platform, observing actors who perform ritualistically in whiteface. The company dives into the material admirably but there just isn't enough there.

Photo Danni Simmons and Ted Caine by Deneka Peniston.

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