THEATER - "Levittown"

After World War II, the architect William Levett built a series of model homes out of spare parts in order to provide GIs with cheap housing and a homey place to house their traumatic pasts. Playwright Marc Palmieri has done much the same, so much so that it would be just as fair to call this play Palmieritown as Levittown. Like Levett, Palmieri has built a series of scenes out of scraps from a greater work, and he’s provided his characters with a place to house trauma, but not to grow beyond it. Director George Demas struggles to express these ghosts, silhouetting them through the wall like skeletons in a closet, and it’s a good effect—but then we’re off on another tangent, and it turns out to be just an effect after all.

Palmieri’s writing is blissfully simple, and he’s endowed this family drama with a bunch of lively, entertaining characters. But these, like the literal tricks of light that allow for ghosts to rise from the dead, are fragile house-of-card moments, often blown over by the next in a series of scenes that can’t really settle on a central narrative. It’s just one dysfunction to another, from the son’s attempt to resolve the rift between his father and soon-to-be-wed sister, to the grandfather’s poignant (but aimless) encounters with the dead. You can’t make one a focal point without the other seeming irrelevant and when placed together it becomes an overlap of good ideas competing for space.

Furthermore, Levittown’s choice of exposition is ill scripted: obvious things are over-analyzed while the real hearts of these characters are left in a muddle. Yes, the mother’s obsession with meditation makes sense—but is cousin Joe nothing more than blue-collar comic relief? If we accept the son’s blind faith, how do we explain the father’s one-dimensional malice? Why must good old Uncle Jack come back, clad in firefighter gear, simply to spout some exposition about the “terrible” secret upstairs? More importantly, how does the sister’s fiancée go from being a reclusive nerd in one scene to being a take-no-shit jock in the next?

At least the acting is lends an air of solidity to all this bouncing about. As far as comic relief goes, Michael Laurence is a pleasure to watch as Joe, and Joe Viviani (who plays the war-veteran grandfather) has a masterful command over the silences that come with a good, clean haunting. Less astounding are actors Brian Barnhart (son) and Curzon Dobell (father) who exude meekness or intensity, but never learn anything from the other. The rest of the cast is good, and Palmieri’s script picks up as the number of people onstage grows. In these moments, Levittown seems lived in and well imbued with energy. But then come the ghosts, and cool as they seem, they’re such a drag.