Theatre in Review: Snow Orchid (Miranda Theatre Company/Theatre Row)

	Stephen Plunkett, Robert Cuccioli. Photo: Jeremy Daniel

Late in the second act of Snow Orchid, two no-holds-barred parent-child confrontations make a sleeping play leap to savage, scalding life. Sebbie (short for Sebastiano), the elder son in a titanically troubled family, announces that he is, at long last, leaving for good. But first, he must face off against his father, Rocco, who has finally discovered the open secret shared by the rest of the family (and much of the neighborhood): Sebbie is gay. Because this is Brooklyn, in 1964, and the family is Italian-Catholic, this conversation is not going to go well.

Sebbie is leaving with his lover, a local Irish kid, to start a new life in Texas, where they have been promised jobs as auto mechanics. Rocco has recently returned from a mental institution, proclaiming that, thanks to therapy and plentiful tranquilizers, he is no longer the monster who for years terrorized the family. Sebbie, who can't forget the beatings he suffered at Rocco's hands, is having none of it; furthermore, he doesn't care what Rocco knows about his private life. Their scene bristles with sexual overtones; when Rocco falls to his knees, begging his son to reconsider his plans, Sebbie removes the towel he is wearing, forcing his father to gaze upon his exposed genitals. Violence soon erupts, only this time, Sebbie is ready to give as good as he gets, wrapping his hands around Rocco's neck and nearly strangling him. The fine actor Stephen Plunkett powerfully channels Sebbie's unleashed fury in a denunciation in which rage and sorrow are thoroughly commingled; the angrier Sebbie becomes, the more we see the bruised little boy, smarting at the injustice of his father's cruelty.

A few minutes later, Sebbie is in his parents' bedroom, caught in an even more hair-raising encounter, this time with his mother. Filumena is a practiced emotional blackmailer and she uses every trick at her command to ensnare her son before he walks out the door forever. She herself hasn't stepped outside the house for years, but now she is dressed for church, ready to hold Sebbie to an earlier promise, that if she will attend ten o'clock mass, he will join her. She then ups the ante by asking him to take her back to her beloved homeland of Sicily. Then, really letting him have it, she murmurs, "I'm the only woman for you," insisting that this is why he has turned to men. (We've already seen Filumena give Sebbie a Hollywood kiss, in a clinch more appropriate for Doris Day and Rock Hudson than a mother and son.) His heart breaking at the sight of so much misdirected love, Sebbie confesses how much Filumena has stifled him, yet admits he stills wants her blessing. She responds with a shocking act of repudiation that sends him reeling out of the room.

These scenes are doubly remarkable because the rest of Snow Orchid fails to live up to them. The playwright, Joe Pintauro, has gotten his hands on some extremely incendiary material, but he can't quite make it ignite. This is in part because the play is so overloaded with dysfunctions -- a marriage festering with grievances, domestic abuse, incest, agoraphobia, closeted homosexuality, mental breakdowns, and a family history of suicide -- that few of them get plausibly dramatized. Each of these woes is announced; few of them are really dealt with.

It's possible that another director might find the undertone of tension that would turn Snow Orchid into a powerful portrait of a family sitting on a powder keg of unappeased emotions, but too much of the time Valentina Fratti's staging is listless, poorly blocked, and lacking in subtext. (The title refers to some blooms that Rocco brings home from the hospital, which Filumena promptly poisons.) An early scene, in which the newly returned Rocco, losing his carefully cultivated composure, pours bottles of tranquilizers into the family pasta dish and flings the contents around the room, carries little or no shock value. It doesn't help that the production has been extremely awkwardly designed: Patrick Rizzotti has done interesting work elsewhere, but, clearly working with a tight budget, has come up with a confusing ground plan that places the house's first floor upstage and the upstairs bedrooms downstage, with no levels or anything else to demarcate the difference. And for a play in which the family house should seem to be a looming, prison-like presence (as it is in the show's poster), it is represented by a few pieces of furniture backed by flats wrapped in white translucent fabric. It looks like the rehearsal set. (Brooke Cohen's costumes, Travis McHale's lighting, and Quentin Chiappetta's sound design are all acceptable.)

Fratti's direction does little to help the actors find their way through the emotional thicket of Pintauro's script. Robert Cuccioli has trouble locating the deep-seated anger that surely still lurks in Rocco's psyche; the man on stage simply does not match the brute we keep hearing about. Similarly, Angelina Fiordellisi plays Filumena for too long as a fey eccentric; we don't see until very late how deeply she has dug her claws into Sebbie's soul. Plunkett's cocky, tell-it-like-it-is Sebbie alone manages to invest the first act and the first half of the second with any drama. David McElwee is fine as the family's younger son, who is alert to the dramatic crosscurrents in the household and who wonders why nobody cares about him. Timothy Hassler is effective in a brief appearance as Sebbie's lover, who bluntly informs Rocco that he should butt out of his son's business.

This production is a revised version of a play originally produced by Circle Repertory Company in 1982, with a cast that included Olympia Dukakis, Peter Boyle, and Robert LuPone. (A 1993 London production featured Jude Law as Blaise, the younger brother.) Whatever work he has done, Pintauro hasn't yet solved the problems of a script weighed down by so many issues, any one of which would be enough for the foundation of a play. And yet the jury remains out until we can see it in a better-directed and-designed production. Pintauro is a fearless writer; he needs equally fearless collaborators.--David Barbour