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Better

Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris

Echo Theater Company at Awater Village Theatre

Through Nov. 16

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Jessica Goldberg told The Jewish Journal that her new play Better is quasi-autobiographical, written in the wake of her father’s death from brain cancer in conjunction with her own crumbling marriage to actor Hamish Linklater.

In Better, Goldberg struggles to contain her antipathy towards a character named Cal (Johnathan McClain), who’s the husband of the play’s protagonist Annie (Meredith Bishop). Annie, who runs a restaurant in NYC, has returned home to Ohio to visit her dying father, Marty (Joe Spano, a tender, endearing performance). Goldberg portrays Cal as an absentee husband and father, an author on a continuous book tour, promoting his latest self-help exegesis with a string of platitudes. Cal’s self-absorption becomes the underlying cause of Annie’s instant attraction to and eventual affair with a home-town contractor, Frank (Malcolm Madera, persuasive in the role).

This antipathy towards Cal, however, may not be all Goldberg’s doing. Under Jennifer Chamber’s often-astute direction, McClain’s performance swerves into ingratiating self-importance. During his many long absences, Cal has been questioning the restrictions of his own marriage to Annie, the constrained ambitions of their life together. When he tells her this, he’s already picked up on her affair with Frank, leaving us with the impression of Cal being a sensitive buffoon.

Yet the point about people being in crisis is their self-absorption, and Annie, too, has her share of looking inward, while acting out. Goldberg likes her better than Cal, but she’s too good of a playwright to let Annie off the hook entirely.

Annie’s dying father also likes her better –better than he likes her brother John (Jeremy Maxwell), who’s flummoxed that their father aches to leave his legacy, the store Marty built from scratch, to Annie, and not to John. Not that Annie wants it, but that’s another story.

Annie’s mom (the excellent Sigute Miller) floats in this ether trying to ward off the catastrophes of her husband’s impending death and of Annie’s attraction to Frank, while her mother (Eve Sigall) – a spritely 85-year-old from where Annie gets her interest in Jewish cooking – is showing early signs of dementia. Add to the mix Frank’s ex, Missy (Andrea Grano), and you’ve got an almost comedic subplot of sexual dalliances and their resulting emotional turmoil.

The play comes from a tradition in American playwriting seeped in the permutations of loss – Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, August Wilson. The key to greatness within their best plays is the capacity of tiny details to add up into a majestic perspective on life and death, and all that they signify.

The details in Better resonate fitfully on Stephen Gifford’s living room set (Marty’s death-bed perches on one side). There’s one particularly poetical insight, on the cusp of Marty’s death, that blurs the line between what’s real and what’s imagined – an ambiguity that touches the lives of all the characters. For the most part, however, this is still a small play straining to be larger – a good play nonetheless — part tragedy, part soap opera and part eulogy.

Echo Theater Company at the Atwater Vilage Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave., Atwater Village; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; through Nov. 16. (310) 307-3753, https://www.echotheatercompany.com