Family Planning

Reviewed by Jenny Lower
Colony Theatre
Through Aug. 10

Photo by Michael Lamont

Michelle Kholos Brooks’s world premiere also marks the start of the Colony Theatre’s 40^th anniversary season. Directed by Cameron Watson, recently of the Antaeus Company’s Top Girls, this play lacks that production’s polished energy and explosive exchanges. There’s a sense here of the actors hitting their marks, but without the organic underpinnings that would make the somewhat predictable plotline feel natural.

Adrift in the financial crisis, Sidney (Dee Ann Newkirk) and Michael (Jack Sundmacher) have moved back to her childhood home to launch his business and establish her painting career, only to get roped into putting up both Sidney’s nitpicking mother (Christina Pickles) and her granola-munching father (Bruce Weitz), happily divorced for decades. The cramped reunion in the family homestead pleases no one.

David Potts’s gorgeous set serves as the fifth character in this domestic comedy, filling the expansive stage with exposed beams and comfortable, timeworn clutter, suffused with Jared A. Sayeg’s golden lighting.

Pickles and Weitz’s sniping is amusing at times, but there’s a de rigueur, obligatory feel to it that makes it seem propelled less by genuine discord than by a need to serve the plot. Pickles has perfected the maternal sniff, but her late-stage eruption lacks heat. Ditto to Newkirk and Sundmacher’s portrayals of understandable but tiresome marital woes, in which Sundmacher is given little to do but grouse about his in-laws.

Instead it’s Weitz and Newkirk’s private father-daughter chat and Pickles and Weitz’s meandering reminiscences of their characters’ marriage that number among the play’s strongest scenes. If their fears about starting over, and houses gone silent from departed spouses and children seem to play to the Colony’s mature audiences, that makes their confessions no less sincere or poignant.

Colony Theatre, 555 N. Third St., Burbank; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat., 3 p.m., Sun., 2 p.m.; through Aug. 10. (818) 558-7000, colonytheatre.org.