CULT OF LOVE: American Dahlhouse — Review
The template of the family reunion drama springs as eternal as the American myths it continues to address. Joining that lineage at the Broadway level is Leslye Headland’s Cult of Love, first performed in 2018 and now making its New York debut at the Hayes Theatre in a starry, captivating production directed by Trip Cullman. With great wit and gently gestured thematic breadth, it tackles the country’s thrall to its righteous, morally dubious origins through the contentious return of a deeply Christian Connecticut household’s offspring on Christmas Eve.
It opens with most of the Dahl family already assembled on John Lee Beatty’s cozily decorated living room set, snow idyllically dancing outside. The characters are plenty and easily distinguished, though not simplistic. Ginny (Mare Winningham) is the matriarch who downplays her husband Bill’s (David Rasche) deteriorating dementia in favor of the holiday’s nostalgic power. This, despite the fact that three of her four children keep contact to a minimum. There’s Mark (Zachary Quinto), a seminary-taught lawyer who now leads an urbane life with his Jewish-born wife, Rachel (Molly Bernard); Evie (Rebecca Henderson), the second eldest and most fed up, especially with how her conservative parents handle her recent marriage to Pippa (Roberta Colindrez); and Johnny (Christopher Sears), a recovering addict no one’s seen in years who, when he arrives with the last-minute addition of his younger friend, the heathenly Zillennial Loren (Barbie Ferreira), does so with child-like sugar-rush intensity.
Diana (Shailene Woodley), the youngest, married a cloying pastor, James (Christopher Lowell), and has been living with her parents as they prepare for the birth of their second child. With blonde, virginal locks and a faux-humble maternity gown, even Norman Rockwell would find her too much (kudos to Liz Printz’ hair and Sophia Choi’s costume design), and it’s clear she’ll be the one driving the ideological wedge between the family with the fixed smile of a street corner proselytizer. Despite stones being thrown from each house with increasing precision and destruction, Diana’s is the only one the parents seem to protect, much to the others’ chagrin. The performances are all-around sterling, with Ferreira and Woodley the most conspicuous of the debuting Broadway cast, alongside Bernard, Henderson, Lowell, and Sears.
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The Dahls are predisposed to joining together in a number of Christian songs, as they so joyfully once did, and Headland relies a bit too heavily on this idea of the communal power of music to offer temporary reprieves from their arguments. (“Children, Go Where I Send Thee,” with its cumulative structure, seems to go on forever, though Loren hilariously cuts into that scene’s sickly sweetness by offering that many of these Christmas carols are “co-opted spirituals” originally sung by slaves.) But they are nicely sung and arranged and, as it happens, their contributing to the production’s sometimes lumpy pacing joins forces with the reunion’s discomfort to create an appropriately realistic gathering.
Mark is a similarly unsettled beast. For a while, it seems he is the least fleshed out of the characters, decidedly cosmopolitan yet never really taking a stance against his family’s judgments. But he delivers the sharpest, most clear-eyed reads, and is slowly unveiled to be, not poorly sketched, but rather the most conflicted. At the heart of Cult of Love is a bleak acknowledgement of the current existential impasse in the fight for America’s soul. The country loves its roots, however homicidally evangelical, enough to repeatedly reach across a chasm that has grown frustratingly vertical, from aisle to wall. No matter how many times their counterparts show where their values lie, the progressive Dahls continue to hope they will be validated in their efforts to recover the clan’s old glory, even as they appraise it in troubling terms. Mark emerges as the central figure caught in this battle: an American Orpheus, a lapsed Gatsby. Can’t repeat the past? Headland’s play deftly claims we’re doomed if we beat on.
Cult of Love is in performance through February 2, 2025 at the Hayes Theatre on West 44th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.