(clockwise from top left) Christopher Sears, Barbie Ferreira, Roberta Colindrez, Mare Winningham, David Rasche, Rebecca Henderson, Shailene Woodley, and Zachary Quinto in Cult of Love. Photo: Joan Marcus

No matter what sort of dysfunction might plague your family of origin, you’ll find it, larger than life and twice as uncomfortable, in Leslye Headland’s Cult of Love, with the added sparkle of being embodied by a cast of prestige TV all-stars: The patriarch is slipping quickly into dementia, accessing a broader range of emotions than he ever did while fully compos mentis, while the matriarch clings to her own narcissism and delusions, willfully blind to everything in her children’s lives that doesn’t fit her happy family image. (Each of the four adult Dahl children has a status their mother finds too uncomfortable to face: one is gay, one a drug addict, one mentally ill, one has left the church; the fact that these are all about equally traumatic for her says a lot.) This devoutly religious family on some surface level accepts their daughter’s newlywed wife, except for the part where that would mean acknowledging their daughter is gay in the first place. One sibling has appointed herself in charge of said parental decline, even though she’s also the one who wants to get away farthest and fastest. One adult child has come home to live with their parents in a moment of crisis. Some siblings have turned away from the faith of their parents; others have dug deeper into religiosity. 

All four compete over who’s the “favorite” and who’s brought home acceptable partners and procreated. There’s the interfaith marriage. The sibling with addiction issues. The sibling with mental health issues. The sibling with the spouse everyone hates. The sibling who keeps shying away from life plans, never quite succeeding or failing. The control freak; the feckless one; the flaky one; the unstable one: every sibling has a preordained role to play.

It’s a lot, in other words—too much, honestly, and crammed in so tight and so thick and fast that it’s hard to get any handle on the members of the Dahl family as people, beyond the particulars of their dysfunction. We get some vague career labels for most of them–this one is a chef, this one an Episcopal priest, this one a divinity-student-turned-Supreme-Court-clerk–but not a lot of personality. As a family, their signal trait seems to be the fact that they break into fully harmonized, multi-instrumental song far more often than your average crowd, even in carol-singing season. 

But let’s back up. It’s Connecticut, it’s Christmas Eve in the exuberantly, lavishly decorated Christmas wonderland that is the Dahl family home (John Lee Beatty’s set perfectly captures this slice of upper-upper-middle-class holiday-drunk suburbia), and 80 percent of the family gathers round the piano: parents, one on guitar and one on piano; three of the four siblings, some with instruments and some without; three spouses, participating with varying degrees of enthusiasm and/or drunkenness. (Sophia Choi’s costumes likewise give us key information about the family members.) They are eagerly awaiting the arrival of the fourth sibling (and his mysterious +1) so they can finally sit down to dinner. It’s 9 pm already, hangriness prevails, a little too much wine has been drunk by too many, and the night is already well past the point of fraying at the seams. Patriarch Bill (David Rasche) is at the piano, though he can’t remember the word “piano”; matriarch Ginny (Mare Winningham) strums a guitar and flatly refuses to consider serving dinner before Johnny (Chris Sears)—he of the addiction issues—arrives. Eve is the newlywed; her wife, Pippa (Roberta Colindrez), is spending her first holiday with the in-laws. And while Eve (Rebecca Henderson, not-perhaps-entirely-coincidentally playwright Headland’s wife) tries to get her siblings to take notice of their father’s mental state—she’s already made a neurologist appointment that her parents, no fan of doctors, no-showed for—Pippa tries to get her bearings. Oldest brother Mark (Zachary Quinto) and his wife, Rachel (Molly Bernard), are on the verge of separating after a series of miscarriages and Rachel’s growing disaffection with Mark’s lack of direction in life.

And then there’s the youngest sibling, Diana (Shailene Woodley). Diana and her husband, James (Christopher Lowell), an Episcopal minister, have a six-month-old son and she’s visibly pregnant with child #2. They moved home after Thanksgiving, which all of their siblings just found out tonight. They also don’t know that Diana is off her psychiatric meds, though the religious content of her delusions has already led her to some acts of stunning cruelty toward her siblings and siblings-in-law. And over the course of the night, it’s only getting worse, in some deeply dangerous ways—ways that Ginny, whose own mental health issues are less well documented but clearly present, and James, who seems to have the most rigidly blinkered understanding of Christianity and faith in the play, are wittingly or unwittingly reinforcing.

The narrative proceeds mostly as a series of increasingly dire emotional catastrophes, punctuated by interjections of sanity and/or clearheadness on the parts of the outsiders. The Dahls are too wrapped up in their own psychodramas to see themselves, but the various in-laws and new arrivals have a healthy dose of perspective: Rachel, who’s been doing this longest, who converted for Mark before he lost his own faith, and who is on her last nerve with Diana in particular but with the whole passive-aggressive kit and caboodle, really. Pippa, who’s trying her damnedest to stay on an even keel and merely witness what occurs, but whose own boundaries are pushed to the limit. And Johnny’s friend/sponsee, Loren (Barbie Ferreira), who doesn’t have to fake allegiance to anyone but Johnny. 

It’s not the fault of the performances, most of which are sound if uninspired, but the lack of texture in characters who are either emotionally impervious or on their last nerve. Winningham’s blithe obliviousness (with a few dashes of martyrdom), Rasche’s mostly cheerful fog of dementia, Woodley’s poisonously sweet sanctimony, and Lowell’s pompous righteousness all kind of take us to the same place, as do Ferreira’s and Colindrez’s steady equanimity. Bernard, Henderson, and Quinto oscillate between flaring up and simmering down. 

One of the play’s biggest frustrations is that Headland relies so heavily on the wisdom of strangers as a storytelling engine. Rather than letting us in the audience learn our way through all the dark nooks and crannies of the Dahls, or letting us see them in action and draw our own conclusions, she dangles the insights and reactions of Rachel, Pippa, and Loren to signpost how objectively offensive some of Ginny’s, and especially Diana’s and James’s, statements are. 

I recently read an interview with playwright Mac Wellman, in which he says, “Naturalism in this country tends to get sentimentalized. It’s not about what people actually say and do, which is interesting; it’s about their motivation, their sensitive inner lives, their conflicts because of their bad childhood and their addictions and all of that kind of baloney. Rather than the weird things you see people do every day.”

And in the moments where we actually see the weird things this family does–especially the moments when those weird things are what hold them together–the play sometimes starts to click. This is due as much to director Trip Cullman as to the script; Cullman’s strongest work comes when the family stops thinking and emoting and starts singing, when the patterns of song take over and make them remember that they love(d) each other, or at least tried harder to believe they did; we see the occasional reminder of who they once wanted to believe they were. The unit as a whole may be unsavable—as Evie says, they’ve reached the point in their lives where they’re no longer a family, but someone’s problem–but in a few sparse moments, we can still feel the connections.  And even as a problem, we don’t sense that there’s enough momentum in that revelation to finally smash the whole. They may be just a shiny shell of family togetherness–a hollow Christmas ornament–but does any of them have the will to change things?

My companion and I had seen Appropriate together in the same theater just about a year ago, and visually, at least, there’s a connection, both set in richly detailed domestic interiors where a family feels trapped by the weight of their shared past. But underneath the web of family dysfunction, Appropriate acknowledged something scarier and stranger. It seemed to take aim at some of the darkest strands within American history and within consumer capitalism–and, certainly, at the darkness that often hides within the realist play’s centering of the nuclear family. Cult of Love has fuzzier targets. It’s against narcissism; against a particular strain of religion-fueled bigotry; against noncompliance with psychiatric medication regimens, perhaps. But even at the play’s most vicious, Headland can’t give up on the Dahl family entirely. You get the sense that they’ll all be right back here next Christmas (with the possible exception of Rachel), with two more new babies sleeping upstairs and the same manic carol-singing. Maybe Ginny will be a little crazier; maybe Diana will be a little stabler–but we still won’t know what holds these people together, or what could, in the end, be bad enough to tear them apart. They may end up slightly more, or less estranged, but there’s not enough that’s truly strange here–not enough of the weird things people do every day.