Leslye Headland has developed a following for her acclaimed Netflix series “Russian Doll” and for “The Acolyte,” the Disney Channel’s latest installment of the “Star Wars” saga. And if Cult of Love, her new show that just opened on Broadway, were a multi-episode TV soap like “Succession” or “Yellowstone” it might have worked better for me.
For Cult of Love certainly has all the elements of those melodramas: a star-studded cast, a large dysfunctional family and clashes over issues like sex, money, drugs, what to do with difficult aging parents and who mom loves more. The problem for me is that Cult of Love doesn’t really dig into any of those subjects. Instead it devotes much of its energy to fooling around with—and making foolish fun of—religion and the people who have faith in it.
And yet, the audience at the performance I attended was delighted with the show, literally cheering its slaps at religious faith. Headland famously grew up in a strictly religious household and so I suppose she is still working out her feelings about that. Fair enough. I don’t know how closely the Dahls, the family in the play, resemble her own parents and siblings but it’s clear why anyone would have conflicted feelings about being related to them.
Mom Ginny is a passive-aggressive control freak who deals with problems by pretending they don’t exist and downing a cocktail. One of those problems is her husband Bill, who is blithely slipping into dementia. But their grown children aren’t in much better shape.
The eldest son Mark studied at the Yale Divinity School but dropped out to become a lawyer, although he is now restless again even after having clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. And he’s also struggling with a failing marriage to his wife Rachel, a Jewish woman doubting her decision to convert to marry Mark and join a family that years later still regards her as a heathen.
Evie, the oldest Dahl daughter is successful in her career as a chef but she’s resentful because the family hasn’t fully accepted her recent marriage to a woman. Younger brother Johnny is a heroin addict who’s in such shaky recovery that he’s brought the woman he’s sponsoring with him to the family’s Christmas Eve celebration for moral support (John Lee Beatty designed the Christmas-cardy set). And then there’s the baby of the family, Diana, who is married to a timid Episcopalian priest and fanatically devout.
Ostensibly, the Dahls love one another but they don’t know how to talk to one another and so when they run out of things to say they pick up instruments and start to sing as though they were refugees from some old John Doyle musical. They sing a lot. I sighed when I realized they were going to go through all 10 verses of the spiritual “Children Go Where I Send Thee.”
Like most families, mine hasn’t been immune from holiday drama but I didn’t believe a bit of this one. That’s not because of the acting. The strong cast lead by Mare Winningham and David Rasche as the elder Dahls, Zachary Quinto as Mark, a scene-stealing Molly Bernard as Rachel and Shailene Woodley making an impressive stage debut as Diana (click here to read an interview with her) all work hard to create a semblance of both the family’s bonds and it fractures.
But the play’s100-minute running time doesn’t leave enough time for them to do more than state their positions and then move on to the next plot point. A speech in the final moments tries to sum up the play’s themes but it's too late by then. I wanted more show and less tell and I resented that the serious questions about faith hadn't been treated seriously until then.
I also didn’t believe that the spouses and significant others would have stuck around while the Dahls were going at one another. And I really didn’t believe that they would have joined in with the singing.
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