DRAMA; 1hr 55min
STARRING: Keith Kupferer, Katherine Mallen Kupferer, Tara Mallen, Dolly De Leon
The play’s the thing: De Leon and Kupferer
Domestic bliss is a memory in the Mueller household, where fuses are blowing right and left. Dan (Kupferer), a Chicago construction worker for whom the word “repressed” could have been invented, is battling to keep his powder-keg 15-year-old daughter, Daisy (Mallen Kupferer), from being expelled from school for basically acting out as a bundle of rage. Dan’s wife and Daisy’s mother, Sharon (Mallen — fun fact: the three leads are an actual family), is at a loss to deal with either her husband or her child. It’s not that there’s no love here, more that something insurmountable has obviously overwhelmed it.
That something, it emerges, is the suicide of Dan and Sharon’s 17-year-old son, Brian, and the subsequent wrongful-death lawsuit they are filing against Brian’s ex-girlfriend and her parents. Grief is now the fourth member of the Mueller family, in all its ugly insatiability. Surely the last thing Dan needs under these appalling circumstances is a part in in a community theatre production of Romeo and Juliet. Not only is he unfamiliar with a play whose trajectory uncannily mirrors his own, but he has never acted, has no desire to and is a combustible mess wrapped in an impassive casing.
And yet rehearsals are where Dan and his demons find themselves in this lovingly burnished jewel from writer-director Kelly O’Sullivan and her co-director, Alex Thompson, seeking shelter in classic scenes that run a gamut from the wholesale clunk of suburban dramatics to the furthest reaches of suffering.
Everyone involved is note-perfect: Kupferer, in whose silences so much rests, Mallen Kupferer for the emotional multitudes she contains as Daisy, Mallen’s Sharon lending them hard-fought support, and De Leon as Dan’s fellow cast member, Rita, who saw a need in him he didn’t realise he had. And as Rita and her wholehearted fellow travellers defy probability by making Shakespeare their own, their leap of faith becomes a beacon of hope, rescuing the Muellers from the wreckage of themselves.
