Close Ties

AIN'T LIFE GRAN? Robers, right, sketches it out for Gallagher.

The element of surprise is live theater’s ace in the hole—the jolt that reminds us it’s live. But how rare it is for a well-behaved, slow-cooking domestic dramedy like Elizabeth Diggs’s Close Ties to swerve off-road and smack us head-on. That’s exactly what happens roughly 30 minutes into this seemingly poky, standard-issue family study, when sweet, doddering, 84-year-old Josephine (Judith Roberts) loses her bearings and turns viciously on her adult granddaughter Anna (Polly Lee).

The leap from quaint to queasy is handled so masterfully by Diggs, director Pamela Berlin and the top-notch cast—and there are enough other kerfuffles in store—that we can almost forget that this is, at bottom, a should-we-put-Grandma-in-a-home play. There are ginned-up squabbles among Josephine’s granddaughters, a Northeastern-model Beth Henley trio: pretty but cautious Anna, mousy Connie (Julie Fitzpatrick) and near-sociopathic Evelyn (Fiona Gallagher). But they, and Evelyn’s uninvited boyfriend, Ira (Tommy Schrider), are around mostly to absorb the blow-by-blow of the nursing-home debate. This is even more true of the (underwritten) remaining family members.

As these players crowd and disperse across Michael Schweikardt’s ultrarealistic kitchen set (you can actually smell the bacon burning), we feel the playwright’s pen nudging them along and underscoring the battle lines a little too neatly. But there’s no arguing with Diggs’s fine-grained empathy and frisky humor, or with a production that so expertly matches and raises her ante. It’s not nice to admit it, but theater this good is always a pleasant surprise.