The Lyons

Linda Lavin was amazing in Other Desert Cities earlier this year off-Broadway. She was fantastic in Follies at the Kennedy Center this summer. She could have transferred to Broadway with either of those shows. Instead, she chose to do a small off-Broadway play at the Vineyard Theater. Things this makes me think:
1) She wasn't willing to let her role in The Lyons go to any mere mortal.
2) She is fabulous enough (and old enough and successful enough) not to need "Broadway" to legitimize her.
3) She is Linda Lavin. Bow down, bitches.

The Lyons is a dysfunctional family comedy, and that should make it not work. This is all very, very familiar territory, but it's plumbed with such aplomb (see what I did there?) that the show is a refreshingly bitter pill that I very much enjoyed swallowing.

Linda plays Rita Lyons who sits by her husband's deathbed wondering aloud how to redecorate her living room as he, Ben (Dick Latessa), learns to let all of his feelings show in as profane and vituperative a manner as possible. Rita and Ben haven't told their children that their father is dying of cancer...so as not to upset them unnecessarily. And thus, they spring it on both son and daughter as Ben is knocking on heaven's door. Kate Jennings Grant plays daughter Lisa who Rita thinks should get back with her ex-husband. Rita also thinks one of Lisa's children might be "a little retarded," but that's a minor point. Michael Esper plays Curtis who Ben thinks is pretty much a big, gay waste of space.

The show beautifully toes the line between vicious and tender and while ultimately it's a bit unfocused, it has deeply earnest and yet thoroughly unsentimental things to say about the tenuous bonds of family. The twist here is that the author glibly takes down the notion that family is the most important unit.

The first act zips by. It's a single scene set in Ben's hospital room, and it just has a great pace. Things in the second act get a bit more unwieldy. There's a quick scene at an AA meeting, a longer scene with Curtis looking at an apartment, and then we're back to the hospital where everything comes together again beautifully. Curtis's apartment hunting scene is masterfully uncomfortable building from awkwardness to forthright animosity so smoothly that I had that knife-in-the-gut feeling that I love so much...when tension builds steadily enough that you can only zero in on the action and wait for what seems with each passing moment to be inevitable.

So yeah, it's a vicious little play filled with a ton of really big laughs. Lavin is a natural comedian. It's such a cliche to say you can't take your eyes of someone, but there were whole stretches of the first act where I realized I wasn't looking at anyone else even when they were talking. There isn't a single tic wasted, and while you could argue (probably correctly) that she upstages her fellow cast at every opportunity, every one of those moments is so right and so specific that it hardly matters.

I mean, bottom line: go for the Lavin, stay for the laughs. Or vice versa. Just don't go with family.