'The Assembled Parties' review — this elegantly elegiac family drama is a heartfelt study of mortality

Read our review of The Assembled Parties, starring Tracy-Ann Oberman and Jennifer Westfeldt, now in performances at the Hampstead Theatre to 22 November.

Summary

• The late playwright Richard Greenberg tells the story of a New York-Jewish family in crisis
• The Assembled Parties is set during two Christmases 20 years apart
• Jennifer Westfeldt and Tracy-Ann Oberman excel as sisters-in-law Julie and Faye
• Alexander Marks makes a strong debut as Julie's sons

A family falls away before us in Richard Greenberg’s gently mournful The Assembled Parties, which could just as easily be titled A Disassembled Wake. Telling the biting if baggy story of an extended New York-Jewish clan coming apart at the seams, Blanche McIntyre’s empathic production mines the mortality fringing the action. The sense throughout of a gradually curdling good cheer has only been accentuated by the playwright’s own death this past summer of cancer, age 67.

The 2013 play is set across two Christmases in a secular Jewish household on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, shifting after the interval from the Reagan era of the 1980s to the pre-Obama regime of George W. Bush – which now seems a halcyon period in American politics if one can imagine such a thing. And with the progression forward 20 years this production, initially underpowered, finds its footing, which carries through to an ending steeped in a spoken optimism undercut at every turn both by events within the play itself and what we know of the world right now.

The abiding dynamic is that between the onetime screen star Julie (a feathery-voiced Jennifer Westfeldt, the appealing American actress here inheriting original Broadway star Jessica Hecht’s role) and her big-haired sister-in-law Faye, the play’s showpiece part which Tracy-Ann Oberman lances with deftly timed aplomb.

As did a Tony Award-winning Judith Light on Broadway, Oberman feasts on a role that is the play’s equivalent of the hefty goose on offer at Christmas meal number one. By the time of the follow-up Christmas, the menu has changed to clear soup and boeuf bourguignon, while a sizable Christmas tree has given way two decades later to a smaller, scrappier version: the shifting visual itself representative of a larger depletion.

The first act finds both women accompanied for the holiday meal by spouses whom they hold in varying degrees of favour. Julie has two sons, one of whom, four-year-old Tim, has taken to his bed where he is comforted by older brother Scotty, who is spoken of as a president-in-the-making, even if he would far rather enter academe. Making his professional debut, Alexander Marks excels as the senior of the boys and then as the junior one grown into a fretful young man, who comes bearing multiple revelations as the (rather overpacked) plot unfolds.

Our way into the action is Scotty’s great chum Jeff (Sam Marks, in a beautifully observed performance), who clearly finds in Julie the mother he’s never had. That much is revealed in a bravura phone call from Jeff to his own mother which is the nearest the play has to an inbuilt showstopper.

By the second half, James Cotterill’s set has stopped revolving: illness and death have come calling in ways not to be revealed here, and the tenancy is running out on an apartment so big that its layout is continually confounding. Think of that as the problem of every Manhattanite’s dreams.

Greenberg’s way with language was itself dreamy – a prolific, Tony-winning wordsmith who here invokes the very Noël Coward to whom he was often compared and for whom words like “simulacrum” and “aleatory” emerge with ease from the mouths of characters who cling to correct grammar like some last vestige of grace: this play’s lingering on the word “whom”, indeed, is one example.

It’s saddening to read a programme interview with the author knowing he didn’t live to see this production, though Greenberg’s own distaste for travel suggests he would have been unlikely to make the journey regardless. And he may not have wanted to witness firsthand whether references to Louis Auchincloss, E. E. Cummings or even Armand Assante mean anything anymore, not least in the UK.

On the other hand, the vagaries of human behaviour, of course, transcend time and place. Or as Julie rendingly remarks, of the arrival of a baby towards the end: “They become people, and we all know how that goes.” Greenberg knew, and, watching his elegantly elegiac play, so do we.

The Assembled Parties is at the Hampstead Theatre to 22 November. Book The Assembled Parties tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: The Assembled Parties (Photos by Helen Murray)