The Assembled Parties

It’s a fine line between the kind of plays in which people talk a lot and nothing really happens and it’s really profound, and the ones where people talk a lot and nothing happens and it’s really boring. The Assembled Parties can’t quite work out which it is. It looks and sounds like one of the good ones, with plenty of literate, sparkling conversation between its clever and conflicted characters, but there’s something ill-fitting about it, something awkward, like it’s wearing the profound kind of play as a costume.

Writer Richard Greenberg, who died in July, had a lot of success in America and a little over here. This play, which premiered in New York in 2013, hasn’t been seen in the UK but Blanche McIntyre’s production doesn’t really make a strong enough case for it. A quirky setup has a big New York Jewish family celebrating Christmas at the insistence of gentle, loving matriarch Julie Bascov. It’s 1980. She and husband Ben and their two sons invite sister-in-law Faye, her husband Mort and their lumpen daughter Shelley to their huge Upper West Side apartment for dinner. It seems almost to play out like one of those big meaty American family dramas, so why can’t it escape the feeling that it’s just cosplaying as a good play?

Well there are the mannered performances for one thing, particularly for characters who have about ten lines and then just float around pointlessly: Daniel Abelson’s Ben, a blend of Billy Crystal and Christopher Walken, and Julia Kass’s gauche Shelley. American actress Jennifer Westfeldt is the airy Julie, desperate to bring the family together, full of poise, who might be entrancing but for the fact she sounds like Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek on helium. With a voice several octaves lower, a wig several inches higher, a formidable staunchness and an arsenal of cutting lines is Tracy-Ann Oberman, sinking her teeth into the overbearing Faye, who married husband Mort because she got pregnant and hates both him and Shelley.

Those big front-and-centre, capital-p Performances make the quieter ones all the more welcome, like Sam Marks as Jeff, best pal of the Bascov’s elder son Scotty. He does a good line in listening, and in small gestures, like touching his hand to Scotty’s in a minuscule moment that makes you wonder if you’re reading too much into it.

That’s the problem. There’s always the suggestion of depth under the very still waters; you can read into the play ideas around parent/child relationships, and the various ways parents mess up their kids - not enough love, or too much – as well as things like family, ritual and Jewishness. But it’s all left to seep out so gently through the endless, nattering conversations that you’re left questioning whether it’s there at all.

I think it’s a case of you’ll like Greenberg’s style or you won’t. It’s very American – maybe we don’t quite recognise the Upper West Side types he’s portraying over here – and played for wit, humorous in the way a New Yorker cartoon often is: you know it’s supposed to be funny, but can’t quite work out if it actually is. And the production maybe doesn’t do it justice. Too many lines are played for laughs that would be better played as poignant. Too many are played for laughs that just aren’t funny.

Anyway you hope something more exciting will happen after the interval and, to be fair, we zip forward 20 years when half the characters are dead, so that’s interesting. Even so, it quickly settles back into those drifting dialogues, which really grate after a while, until the very end when, against all odds, in a Christmas miracle, it somehow begins to charm… and then it’s over.