Jon Robin Baitz’s family drama, about an upper-crust Republican couple whose daughter has written a potentially scandalous memoir, is certainly well-made: carefully sprinkled with laugh lines, family crises and Big Scenes for each of the five cast members (Stockard Channing, Stacy Keach, Thomas Sadoski, Judith Light and Rachel Griffiths) to earn their standing ovations. My problem with the play is that I didn’t believe a thing in it. The characters seem drawn, not from real life, but from a playwright’s rarefied and second-hand imagination. Dad is a former movie actor and GOP political appointee; Mom is a Nancy Reagan-like grande-dame of the Palm Springs set; their younger son is the producer of a hit TV reality show; daughter is a depressed novelist whose new book is getting excerpted in The New Yorker because “something dropped out” at the last minute. Gee, whatta life.
The family dirty laundry that the book exposes concerns the death of the oldest son, a Vietnam-era radical who committed suicide after being involved in the bombing of a recruitment center. It all feels so familiar, not to say dated: the uptight Republican parents who fouled up their kids; the earnest debates over the responsibility of the artist to real life. Plus a final plot twist that seems to make nonsense of much of what has come before. Still, it’s a well-acted and well-directed (by Joe Mantello) boulevard crowd-pleaser, so don’t be surprised to see it all over next spring’s Tonys.