The trouble with this definition by the head of the family currently in the spotlight at the modest walk-up theater that the 29th Street Rep calls home, is that his family's love falls into the legume category. Mothering comes with heavy doses of punishment and little affection.
Communication is lost in a din of empty talk.
As in Pig , seen two years ago, playwright Tammy Ryan takes us to an unnamed working class neighborhood in Queens. Unlike Pig , or any of the other gritty and gripping dramas produced by this company, the realistic and well-paced first act turns into a surrealistic, repetitious mess after the intermission. Even the excellent performances can't avoid a sense of a play whose characters have lost their way. She lets her garden's tentacles mysteriously reach through the floor of the dining room and we no longer have one pregnant woman but four. Since the realistic laying bare of the abuses that have contributed towards the crippling each of these women emotionally, continues throughout, the surrealism of the second act malfunctions like the characters' lives.