The Lyons

Cort Theatre, New York

(212) 239-6200

***

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Spending time with this fictional family is strangely pleasurable, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Strange because the Lyonses are a thoroughly repulsive bunch—“the sort of blood kin who can’t cling to each other without drawing blood.” So while this play by Nicky Silver, here making his Broadway debut, pulses with sharp humor, “there’s often a gasp within the chuckle.” That’s especially true whenever the family’s matriarch takes center stage. Played with “blithely rendered bitterness” by Linda Lavin, Rita Lyons is a woman who sees no reason why her husband’s late-stage cancer should get in the way of, say, her plans to redecorate. “I’m dying,” Ben Lyons moans from his hospital bed. “I know,” Rita says, flipping through a copy of House Beautiful, “but try to be positive.”

Rita could so easily have been just another stereotypical iteration of “the suffocating Jewish wife and mother,” said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. Yet Lavin “has a peerless ability to humanize her characters even while exposing their lacerating edges.” Ben (a formidable Dick Latessa) is meanwhile no stoic: He relishes the freedom he feels he’s earned to spew obscenities and malice at his family whenever possible. As several plot twists involving the adult Lyons children unfold, it’s hard not to feel for “these injured and injurious people”—while still being appalled by them.

A bit of the mounting drama plays too broadly, said Scott Brown in New York magazine. That might be a consequence of the show’s move to Broadway, since actors playing to a bigger house “instinctively ask for more sympathy from the audience, and ask for it more loudly and insistently.” But this play “still sizzles with Silver’s zingy misanthropy and take-no-prisoners wit.” What’s more, Lavin’s riveting 11th-hour monologue, “seemingly designed to place her on the Tony short list,” should not be missed. She’s unquestionably the center of this “dim moral universe,” and, despite Rita’s loathsomeness, we can’t help but root for her.