The Assembled Parties
It’s a fine line between the kind of plays in which people talk a lot and nothing really happens and it’s really profound, and the ones where people talk a lot and nothing happens and it’s really boring. The Assembled Parties can’t quite work out which it is. It looks and sounds like one of the good ones, with plenty of literate, sparkling conversation between its clever and conflicted characters, but there’s something ill-fitting about it, something awkward, like it’s wearing the profound kind of play as a costume.Writer Richard Greenberg, who died in July, had a lot of success in America and a little over here. This play, which premiered in New York in 2013, hasn’t been seen in the UK but Blanche McIntyre’s production doesn’t really make a strong enough case for it. A quirky setup has a big New York Jewish family celebrating Christmas at the insistence of gentle, loving matriarch Julie Bascov. It’s 1980. She and husband Ben and their two sons invite sister-in-law Faye, her husband Mort and their lumpen daughter Shelley to their huge Upper West Side apartment for dinner. It seems almost to play out like one of those big meaty American family dramas, so why can’t it escape the feeling that it’s just cosplaying as a good play?Well there are the mannered performances for one thing, particularly for characters who have about ten lines and then just float around pointlessly: Daniel Abelson’s Ben, a blend of Billy Crystal and Christopher Walken, and Julia Kass’s gauche Shelley....
