Auctioning the Ainsleys

TheatreWorks

Palo Alto, Calif.

(650) 463-1960

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Laura Schellhardt’s new comedy-drama is a clever look at “how possessions define our lives,” said Robert Hurwitt in the San Francisco Chronicle. The play concerns an offbeat Midwestern family of antiques auctioneers, whose collective obsession with objects warps their relationships with one another. Alice, the terminally ill matriarch of the household, decides to “set things right” by recording the family’s history and—much to her progeny’s dismay—auctioning off their own home along with its overabundance of possessions. On stage, this action all takes place to the “rapid patter” of an auctioneer describing each object—a device that helps propel the well-paced plot. The playwright’s talent for witty turns of phrase, meanwhile, heightens the absurdity of “an auction house putting itself on the block.”

Schellhardt falters, however, by taking her characters a bit too seriously, said Janos Gereben in the San Francisco Examiner. A melodramatic, ponderous tone takes over in the second act, at which point the story becomes an “Arthur Miller–lite sort of family drama.” Alice’s adult children all have “variously dysfunctional lives.” Annalee (Molly Anne Coogan), the neurotic middle child, constantly carries a stapler, with which she reorganizes the documentation of each of her possessions. Aiden (Liam Vincent), Alice’s only son, remains a “puzzling cipher” who usually hides himself away in an empty room. The quirky characters too often come across as caricatures. That might be fine if Auctioning the Ainsleys were simply meant to be an “entertaining soap opera,” but Schellhardt clearly had loftier aspirations.