Jonah O’Hara-David, Luis Feliciano, and Izabel Mar in Family. Photo: Maria Baranova

Feverish and claustrophobic, Celine Song’s play Family feels like it’s somewhere on a Venn diagram that’s got Flannery O’Connor at her most grotesque in one sector, Tennessee Williams’s most cloying family dynamics in another, Angela Carter’s bloody whimsy in a third, and maybe a little section for Sylvia Plath’s daddy issues. Its underlying mythology and its characters aren’t as richly embroidered as any of the above, but it’s packed full of the staple elements of Southern gothic horror: Domestic violence. Multigenerational incest. Rape. “Accidental” death. A funeral of a person who died under not-quite-explained circumstances. A house that’s maybe haunted, maybe has a corpse in its basement, maybe just seeps the poison of the man who built it–that would be the recently deceased father of Alice (Izabel Mar alternates with Violet Savage; I saw Mar), David (Luis Feliciano), and Lionel (Jonah O’Hara-David). Each sibling has a different mother, each mother a “freak” of a different sort. Lionel’s mother is an eight-foot-tall giant; David’s grows a pelt of hair all over her body; Alice’s has a secret hidden face on the back of her head. (Some of director Alec Duffy’s most inspired staging deals with that, but we’ll get there.) Tied by bonds of jealousy, violence, and rage as much as love, the three torment one another and grapple in their own deeply dysfunctional ways with grief, facing off in their shared childhood home, built by their architect father, whom they both loathe and idolize; fear and deify.

What plot there is in Family tends to spiral inward; these siblings might talk, briefly, about leaving or burning the house down, but they’re centrifugally drawn back together as if by an inherited fairy-tale curse. The oppressive, relentless push-pull among the siblings and their different ways of acting out their emotional damage is of course the point, but even at well under 90 minutes, the piece can feel a little stuck in its own mire. But the whole thing gets a giant charge–of energy, intensity, intimacy, discomfort–from the site-specific production, staged by Duffy in a luxe mid-century modern open plan Brooklyn living room that nonetheless manages to conceal some surprising theatrical tricks. The sleek modern realism of the space, which drips with social signifiers of both cultural prestige (extensive vinyl collection, high end appliances, stuffed bookshelves, grand piano) and homely family life (stack of board games, a toy cupboard with cutout doors a kid could crawl into), juxtaposes unsettlingly with Song’s stylized language, Dan Safer’s jerky, twisted movement sequences, the fusty and vaguely Victorian mourning clothes (designed by Oana Botez to be oddly fitting and slightly moldering), and the buzzing from beneath the floorboards (sound design by Steven Leffue)—let alone the intensity of being up close with the off-kilter characters. (All credit to the cast’s execution of Dan Renkin’s fight choreography, which the close quarters make more difficult.)  The performers hide under furniture, disappear into structural crannies that seem like they shouldn’t exist in a real house, sneak up behind audience seating, and sometimes even disappear into parts of the house from which the audience is excluded. In this long, narrow space, there’s no vantage point from which an audience member is going to see all of the action well, which somehow only adds to the menace and uncertainty. 

Each brother brings a different energy to the proceedings, but Mar’s Alice feels like the driving force, especially because it’s via Alice’s body that some of the more surreal elements of the play become tangible. We don’t see a giant, though Linus is tall; we don’t see a bearded lady, though David has a thick mane of hair. But we do get a literal representation of Alice’s dark, secret inheritance, in a way that makes the broken-doll qualities of Safer’s choreography and the mercurial switch-flipping of her moods make a perfect, eerie sense. Mar renders Alice’s emotional lability, her switch from the imperious to the plaintive, with fascinating intensity.  

There’s a genuine unpredictability in being contained in a private room with these three–or staring uneasily at other audience members when the characters have slithered off to another part of the house, possibly more alarming when we don’t have eyes on them. Family is a tough play to enjoy, but in this environment, it definitely makes an impact.