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“Each unhappy family,” Dostoyevsky famously wrote, “is unhappy in its own way.” He might have added that if it weren’t so, theater as we would know it wouldn’t exist.
Family conflict comes in many shapes and sizes. Today’s most prominent form may be political, but even within that, each fighting family has its own dynamic with its own specific points of friction, of pride, of shame and resentment. In her incendiary new play Safe House, L.B. Browne cracks open the basement window on an especially raw story of a family at odds over the state of the union – and a good deal more – in our present disunited age.
A Safe House?
Marc Kudisch delivers a heartbreaking spitfire of a performance as Rock, a right-wing conspiracy theorist convinced an imminent presidential election will bring about a second civil war. The always wonderful Karen Ziemba is his enabling wife Slipper (Rock and Slipper – what telling names!), an exemplar of that familiar kind of creature who goes along with others’ increasingly outrageous behavior to keep her (usually her) family together.
Older daughter Ashley (Anna Roman), a busy lawyer, lives with her parents because of the traumatic disappearance a year ago of prodigal younger daughter Claire (a clever and touching turn by Grace Church). At just 17, already buffeted by radical politics, disillusionment, and personal instability, Claire is about to drop back into the family’s bosom carrying a whole new set of baggage.
The early scenes lean toward comedy-drama. Rock’s enthusiasm for his nearly-complete basement bunker, where the action takes place, reads as old-school and even weirdly comforting. We know this type; he’s been a stock figure in pop culture and real life since the dawn of the atomic age. But of course, each unhappy reactionary is unhappy in his own way.
Meanwhile Ziemba’s Slipper is knife-sharp, threading a narrowing needle, working to ground the family in reality through artful peacekeeping. It’s a thankless task. Rock is undergoing distressing personality changes, while politically liberal Ashley withdraws into workaholism to keep her simmering differences with her father from boiling over. And that’s before Claire even arrives.
Roman is especially impressive, crafting Ashley as a skein of clenched velvet, parrying and maneuvering through tight tangles of emotion, spitting fire with Rock in one scene, revealing pinpoint comic timing with the masterful Ziemba in another.
The Sickness Beneath
As if this tinderbox of a live family weren’t enough, we’re also treated to Rock’s flashback visions – which are themselves at odds. The ghost of his war-hero father (a slightly operatic Glenn Seven Allen) goads him to fulfill a twisted masculine ideal; the shade of Young Claire (a fine and spirited performance by Julianna Layne) recalls happier times when Rock was the doting father of a troubled child.
Director Benjamin Viertel impressively intersects these scenes whiplash-style with the present-day action. The production’s smart staging covers space as well as time, as clever set design by Forest Entsminger lets us see the action inside a hidden chamber.
There’s a bit of clunkiness in two characters played by Justin Lee Miller. A doctor friend makes plot-advancing visits that seem a bit anachronistic in an age long past the era of the house call, even though he’s there in his friend capacity. (This isn’t Chekhov, after all!) A policeman turns up to move the plot too, and I wondered whether the play might have done without him and even without the doctor.
Regardless, Browne’s skillful acceleration of the story and the four top-notch central performances create a gripping experience that’s likely to leave you thankful for whatever healthy family relationships you might have. Safe House runs through September 13, 2026 at Theatre Row.
