Broadway review by Adam Feldman
Welcome to the Dahl house! The living room is festooned with Christmas lights, a well-trimmed tree abuts the dining table, and stockings are hung with care by the hearth as aging parents and grown-up siblings reunite for the holidays at the family home in Connecticut. This is the scene of Leslye Headland’s stormy, compassionate, cuttingly observant new play Cult of Love—and if it seems too storybook-cozy to be true, that’s because it is.
The Dahl family is close, but less in the sense of intimate than in the sense of stifling. They come together most joyfully when they’re making music, which they do often throughout the play, drawing on a seemingly endless supply of props that are scattered around the space: upright piano, banjo, uke, melodica, harmonica, washboard, bells. But such instruments of distraction can only do so much to keep the family’s shadows at bay: illness, disappointment, anger, fear.
Cult of Love | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
Family matriarch Ginny (Mare Winningham) uses the rituals of Christmas festivity as a shield for her denial and defensiveness; her husband, Bill (David Rasche, the latest in Broadway’s recent succession of actors from Succession) is showing signs of dementia, which manifests in part as an abundance of affection. (“Okay. I just want to say. That I love everyone here.”) Their eldest child, Mark (Zachary Quinto), who quit divinity school to become a lawyer, now seems stalled once again at a crossroads. His testy sister Evie (Rebecca Henderson) is a successful chef who resents the way her lesbianism is treated within the family—especially by her zealously Christian sister, Diana (Shailene Woodley). Their boisterous brother Johnny (Christopher Sears) is late to the party, causing the others to worry that he has relapsed into addiction.
Cult of Love | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
“We loved this when we were little,” explains Evie to her wife, Pippa (Roberta Colindrez), a newbie to Dahl Christmas. “Everything we did was like this. And we were always together. We rarely saw other people.” But the cocoon that Bill and Ginny spun around their kids—so different from their own childhoods in abusive homes—hasn’t yielded butterflies. All four siblings are struggling, in different ways, to untangle themselves from their family ties and religious upbringing, with varying degrees of support from outsiders. These include Mark’s wife, Rachel (Molly Bernard), who converted from Judaism for him; Diana’s ineffectual husband, James (Christopher Lowell), an Episcopalian priest; and Loren (Barbie Ferreira), whom Johnny met in recovery.
Cult of Love | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
As Cult of Love interrogates religion and family, it throws its characters into crises of faith: in their loved ones and in a higher power, but also in themselves. Headland has written a series of works inspired by the Seven Deadly Sins; her breakthrough play, 2010’s Bachelorette, was about gluttony, and Cult of Love deals with pride. But she doesn’t approach these themes head-on. The pride here is not vanity, but a deep attachment to a facade of family perfection; the Dahls are stuck repeating old patterns because they lack the humility—paradoxically, the strength—to accept reality and wrestle with what Mark, at one point, calls the “complicated smallness” of human experience.
Cult of Love | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
Larger themes notwithstanding, Cult of Love is mostly concerned with exploring just such complicated smallness. With an analytic precision that is tempered by sympathy and humor, Headland expertly renders the shifting dynamics and allegiances within the family and the couples: the gang-ups and ambushes, the protective measures and defensive thrusts. And Trip Cullman’s Second Stage production captures that complexity beautifully. It’s there in every inch of John Lee Beatty’s detailed farmhouse set and in Sophia Choi’s perfectly chosen costumes, and especially in the first-rate work of the large cast. Whether singing or sniping or merely stewing, these ten actors don’t hit a false note, and they blend together seamlessly. It's ensemble acting at a shared high level. They do themselves proud.
Cult of Love. Hayes Theater (Broadway). By Leslye Headland. Directed by Trip Cullman. With Shailene Woodley, Zachary Quinto, Rebecca Henderson, Mare Winningham, David Rasche, Roberta Colindrez, Christopher Lowell, Molly Bernard, Christopher Sears, Barbie Ferreira. Running time: 1hr 40mins. No intermission.
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Cult of Love | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
