A devastating family drama from Leslye Headland is coming to Broadway

The first image of Leslye Headland’s family drama “Cult of Love” on Broadway at the Hayes looks like a Christmas card. Behind a gauzy sheet, most of the ten-member cast pose in festive symmetry, carefully arranged around a living room lit by a thousand Christmas lights. We look at this tableau for a moment before the fabric lifts and the action begins. The introductory pause gives the audience the opportunity to applaud a star ensemble. It also signals that what we’re about to see is glossy – and a little fake.

We find ourselves in the seemingly blissful home of a deeply Christian family, the Dahls, and the elders – Ginny (Mare Winningham, 2022 Tony nominee for “Girl from the North Country”) and her mentally deteriorating husband Bill (David Rasche). , who played a consigliere in “Succession,” have called their adult children home for the holidays. The family members regularly break into impressively harmonized Osmond family-level Christmas carol arrangements that they have apparently been singing together for ages. Some of the siblings’ spouses may roll their eyes, but they often join in, shaking a maraca here, playing a washboard there.

At first everyone is a little upset because Ginny doesn’t serve Christmas dinner until the family’s sweetheart, recovering heroin addict Johnny (Christopher Sears), arrives with his girlfriend and NA colleague Loren (Barbie Ferreira). These two have learned to openly address their problems, unlike the rest of the family who are still in an unexplained crisis. Former theologian Mark (Zachary Quinto) and his wife Rachel (Molly Bernard) are hiding a separation. Pregnant Diana (Shailene Woodley), a bigot, and her Episcopal priest husband James (Christopher Lowell) can’t stop making homophobic comments, while Evie (Rebecca Henderson) and her new wife Pippa (Roberta Colindrez) speak their minds. (Henderson and Headland, the playwright, are married in real life.) Meanwhile, Dad is losing his memory, although Mom doesn’t want to admit it. The scariest line in the play is delivered ironically by Pippa. “Whether you like it or not, You are now the parents,” she tells the arguing siblings before parting ways for her Airbnb.

“Cult of Love,” which Headland says is based on her own family, is this season’s domestic stunner, a Broadway classic whose history dates back at least to Clifford Odets’ lyrical “Awake and Sing!” (1935). But “Cult,” premiered in 2018, moves faster and hits wilder than other works in its category. Headland has been making films and TV shows for a decade — she co-created the Netflix series “Russian Doll” — and in the play’s 100-minute running time, you sense the conflicting methods at work. She and her director Trip Cullman skillfully increase the tension through overlapping dialogue, demonstrating the rhythms of addiction and relapse. (Unfortunately, our own hunger for dysfunctional entertainment is its own kind of addiction.)

Headland sometimes overloads the table with stories. When she takes a breath, however, moments of genuine connection emerge, such as when Bill, radiating amnesiac affection, pleads for peace among his children. Woodley nails Diana’s mediocre combustibility, and both Colindrez and Ferreira, playing outsiders unfazed by their welcome at the Dahl house, do excellent work. Elsewhere, however, Headland’s TV training undermines her. It seems that she needed a few more episodes to implement all the storylines and pontificate speeches.

“Cult of Love” has a subtitle, “Pride,” which refers to both the hubris of faith and one of the seven deadly sins; Headland has written a series of pieces based on each individual piece. In 2010, she caused a sensation with the gluttonous girls’ comedy “Bachelorette.” Two years later, she wrote the greed-themed office farce “Assistance,” which was informed by her own time at Harvey Weinstein. In Headland’s “dirty dioramas,” as she calls these works, there is usually an alpha – a leader whose behavior infects everyone below him in the pack. In “Cult of Love,” the alpha is Ginny, the family’s chief denier, played with frightening precision by Winningham. Usefully, Winningham has a lovely but nasal folk song sound that, whether she’s singing or speaking, cuts through the other, just pretty, voices.

Cult of Love, unlike the other Sin plays, was written when Headland was in her thirties, having married Henderson, whose character Evie can be seen as Headland’s stand-in. Evie’s addiction – one she battles the same way Johnny battles drugs and Mark battles God – affects the toxic family itself. Should she give it up? Performing an intense psychodrama about your wife’s family night after night must be exhausting. Henderson approaches the task with clear seriousness and, like almost everyone, leaves the right to tragedy to Rasche’s bill. His memory problems, glossed over by his unlistening wife, fade from the play’s attention – they’re not climactic material – but you’ll remember them in the days that follow, or at least I did.

The same weekend I saw “Cult of Love,” I also saw “No President,” the latest show from avant-garde group Nature Theater of Oklahoma. The Skirball production is a two and a half hour dance theater marathon with a full corps de ballet performed without an intermission. The company, which has won multiple Obie Awards and international recognition, has experienced its own family psychodrama associated with the multi-year project “Life and Times.” (A rift occurred between the company’s leaders, Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, and its members.)

Like the Dahl family, the nightmarish “No President” – subtitled “A Story Ballet of Enlightenment in Two Immoral Acts” – relies on Christmas music to distract us from the interpersonal grotesquerie. An extended recording of Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker” plays as a narrator, Robert M. Johanson, magnificently intones the plot of the show, which the dancers perform and mime. There are no mice, no soldiers; Instead, Johanson tells a grisly, bizarre fable about an actor-turned-security guard (Ilan Bachrach), whose rise to tyrannical power, like Père Ubu, involves frequent sexual abuse (often perpetrated by him at the hands of a dancing group of “personal demons”) and a cannibal is his approach to a war he is waging against another security company.

Liska and Copper’s ballet-like production begins with pleasure and then deliberately overstays its welcome. In story ballet mode, the corps brings the main characters’ props onto the stage – such as scarves representing the blood of the guard’s many victims – and then leaves with happy little jetés. Ha ha, here we go! But the nine thousandth little jeté might make you scream. You will find it as provocative or punishing as you enjoy other surreal horror projects. I was reminded of French artist Christian Boltanski’s 1969 video loop work “L’Homme Qui Tousse,” in which a man seemingly vomits fake blood onto his chest forever, and Casper Kelly’s short film “Too Many Cooks “. from 2014, which obsessively repeats a fake sitcom theme song. (What is funny becomes boring, becomes funny, and becomes scary.)

As is customary these days, this major downtown performance only lasted three days. The show lampoons the primitive, tutu-clad aesthetic of European high culture, but it also depends on what’s left of that culture: there isn’t enough support in the United States for such daring, resource-intensive work, which is why the show was jointly commissioned by the Ruhrtriennale , Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus and Bard College. I was grateful to have the Nature Theater of Oklahoma back to shake my consciousness, but I felt a little disheartened by the echoes of the sour reckoning of “Cult of Love.” Johanson’s narrator frequently references the actors’ narcissism and their hunger for recognition. Liska and Copper’s text also makes uncomfortably constant and contemptuous references to Bachrach’s body. (The security guard didn’t just take a bath; he “stuffed” himself in the tub, says Johanson.) “You want the spotlight?” I imagine the Alphas of Nature Theater asking. “That’s how it burns.” But that’s exactly what we expect from our holiday entertainment these days. All of our theater makers are angry children, and You are now the parents. ♦