After encountering several stark, minimalist stagings on Broadway of late, however effective they might be, it is refreshing to be presented with such a realistic, detail-rich set at the Hayes Theater. Beautifully designed by John Lee Beatty, with enchanting lighting by Heather Gilbert, we are drawn into a spacious yet cozy and inviting open-plan living room and dining area in a Connecticut farmhouse. It is decorated to the rafters—literally—filled with Christmas wreaths and twinkling festive lights. The stockings have been stuffed and lined above the fireplace. Objects that speak of Christmases past spent in this home are strewn around the room, where there is an endless supply of wine, and a perfectly trimmed and ornamented tree. It is safe to say that these halls are thoroughly decked with boughs of holly. Oh, and to cap things off, we can see flurries of snow falling outside through the frosted windows.
Just when it appears that this Christmas Eve setting—as fit for the holidays as the most opulent Hallmark card—could not be any more ideal, the play opens with the Dahl family’s spirited and flawlessly harmonized rendition of “The Cherry-Tree Carol”. It is a veneer of harmony that is quickly punctured when the singing stops and the Dahls, and their in-laws and guests, begin to talk in Leslye Headland’s exquisitely-crafted dark comedy drama Cult Of Love. The play’s New York premiere at Second Stage’s Broadway home follows its IAMA Theatre Company world premiere in Los Angeles in 2018, a pandemic-era Audible production for Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2020, and a run at Berkeley Rep earlier this year.
Subtitled “Pride”, Cult Of Love is the last in Headland’s series of “Seven Deadly Plays”. In conversation with one another thematically, each standalone play is inspired by one of the seven deadly sins, with this piece examining the word “pride” in all its meanings, including touching upon queer pride and the disapproval of those who would deny us it. A dream cast has been assembled for this Broadway production, who take on the raft of well-defined and compelling characters, with the entire ensemble delivering exceptional performances that, crucially for a family drama, feel lived-in.
Aging patriarch, Bill Dahl (Succession star David Rasche), wants to keep the gathering at his home convivial and frequently returns to his seat at the piano (which he tellingly struggles to remember the word for at one point), to play the carols that his family all join in on just as they no doubt have every Christmas before this one. His wife Ginny (Oscar-nominee Mare Winningham), the Dahl matriarch, is occupied with playing hostess. She is proud of the home that she has created to nuture her “four babies” in, and takes satisfaction in the fact that they always come back for Christmas now that they are adults, spanning their late twenties to early forties.
Strumming on the banjo is their eldest son, Mark (Zachary Qunito, The Boys in the Band), who pulls out a mean Elvis impersonation during one of the many family singalongs throughout the course of the evening, but is generally on the sombre side. He is an unordained graduate of Yale’s Divinity School, who decided to became a lawyer rather than a priest, and his two-year clerkship for Supreme Court Justice Roberts is about to come to an end. His wife Rachel (Younger’s Molly Bernard, reprising the role from the Berkeley production) has reluctantly accompanied him home for the holidays and we quickly pick up on the strains in their marriage, though they intend to keep up appearance for Bill and Ginny.
During the opening musical number, the audience immediately feels an outsider’s affinity with Pippa (Roberta Colindrez, A League of Their Own) who sits quietly bemused, taking in the scene as the fully-committed family energetically sings around her. This is the first Dahl Christmas that Pippa has experienced since marrying Mark’s successful chef sister Evie (Rebecca Henderson, Russian Doll). She had not been invited until the couple tied the knot, and while their marriage might not have made their daughter’s queerness any more palatable to Bill and Ginny, it has made welcoming her wife for Christmas unavoidable. Pippa understandably feels sidelined by most of the Dahls, tolerated rather than accepted, especially by Ginny.
Judging from their tight rendition, “The Cherry-Tree Carol” is a song that the Dahls have sung together countless times before, but Evie now has questions about it. “Why are old men marrying virgins?” Later she defends herself to Mark when he admonishes her for interrupting their singing, saying that she was merely “questioning the problematic lyrics”. Clearly, though, it is more than the lyrics that she has issues with about her Christian family who she believes has not made enough effort to make her, or her wife, feel acknowledged and embraced by them as queer women.
It is treatment which has made Evie want to protectively keep her and her wife at a distance by staying at a nearby Airbnb rather that at the family home. With Pippa making the point that in their daily lives they are surrounded by a chosen family which not only loves them but is proud of them. Rachel, who married into the family after converting from Judaism, tries to reassure Pippa that she will get through her first holiday with Dahls. “Ghost of Christmas Future here to let you know it gets better and worse…I guess what I mean is: You get used to it. And they get used to you”.
In the play script, the youngest sibling—and most the fervent and certainly the most expressively religious family member—Diana (Emmy-nominee Shailene Woodley, making her Broadway debut) is described as having “the voice of an angel” and Woodley’s heavenly singing voice does not disappoint. While many of the sentiments that she comes out with in the Lord’s name, including her homophobia, are hateful and shocking, once she sings it becomes far easier to forgive her. While she is still nursing her firstborn, Diana is already pregnant again and it transpires that she has been staying at the Dahl farmhouse since before Thanksgiving, along with her gratingly holier-than-thou Episcopalian priest husband, James (Christopher Lowell, reprising the role from Williamstown and Berkeley). The news that the couple have been in Connecticut for so long intrigues and irritates Diana’s other siblings, but the reason for it hovers like a spectre unaddressed.
When it emerges that Pippa is also pregnant, the announcement receives a very different reaction to the care that is being shown to Diana, who, having made an unconvincing excuse as to why she couldn’t attend her sister’s wedding to Pippa, goes on to plead with Evie to acknowledge that she is not really gay, just lost from the path that God has chosen for her. Not to leave out the rest of the family, Diana also has some appalling opinions about the reason for Rachel’s multiple miscarriages.
As the clock strikes nine, dinner has still not been served and the guests are famished and hangry. While Bill promises that the lamb, “lam-ba”—it’s a playful family tradition to pronounce and emphases the ‘b’ at the end—is nearly ready, the real cause for the prolonged delay is that the parents are determined to wait for the arrival of their prodigal offspring, Johnny (Christopher Sears, reprising the role from Berkeley). We learn that he is a free-spirted roamer, a recovering drug addict, and the only Dahl to have ever missed a family Christmas in Connecticut.
When Johnny does eventually arrive, there is no apology for his lateness, he simply begins playing the guitar that he walked in with. He launches into the call and response song, “Children Go Where I Send Thee”, which everyone joins in with apart from his accompanying friend, Loren (Euphoria’s Barbie Ferreira), who, like Pippa before her, looks bewildered as she stands at the doorway taking in the scene. A plain-talking truth-teller who met Johnny at an NA meeting, Loren goes on to point that what they have just performed is a spiritual that was sung by “enslaved people escaping to free states” which white Christians like the Dahls have “coopted”. It echoes the earlier outsider observation from Pippa, who casually mentions that what the Dahls refer to as “puffs”, are actually Mexican wedding cookies, or polvorones. These are small objective details that chip away at the what the family has always unquestioningly gone along with. Although Evie reminds her family that she told them what “puffs” were as soon as she got some time away from the stifling household and started culinary school at eighteen, but they ignored her correction.
Headland plays with the familiar irony that amidst the seasonal pressure to celebrate, enjoy each other’s company and not bring up anything negative, the holidays are the only time that the family gathers in its entirety, offering the rare opportunity to address thorny, but pressing issues like the well-being of Bill, who seems to be in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. While Mark questions whether it might be the right time to talk about something so serious, Evie counters that “Christmas is exactly the time to talk about the things we never talk about”.
Despite the friction in the room, Ginny remains determined to keep all of the Dahl Christmas traditions in tact, including some that the rest of the family don’t even recall, like the punchbowl of Manhattans that she serves. She wants all four of her now adult “babies” together, but is in complete denial about the reality of their lives, or at least trying to maintain her own peace of mind. She is not prepared to admit out loud that Evie is gay despite her being married to a woman, maintains that Diana’s mental health is not a problem, claims Johnny was never really addicted to heroin, and that Mark is still a Christian despite him having left the church. Added to which, she does not want to face her husband’s declining health.
Ginny complains that she feels ganged up against and criticized when she is questioned about some of the choices that she made as mother, no matter how trivial they might seem. Like not letting her kids stay overnight at sleepovers—which she has a hilarious one-word delayed response to—yet she did allow them to watch movies that they retrospectively deem as inappropriate, like Little Man Tate and Searching for Bobby Fischer. They question why she showed them films about child geniuses but then did not follow through on being a “chess stage parent” when Johnny showed real promise at a National Elementary Championship. While Bill plays the piano and repeatedly tells everyone he loves them in an attempt to divert and unify the Dahl children, Ginny victimizes herself to encourage them to lay off her and to drink up and be merry.
When the Dahls burst into song, they pick up various instruments that are casually placed around the room. As the tense conversations are halted and they harmonize in song, there are a glimpses of the perfect family Christmas that Ginny and Bill are striving for, like the ones that they, apparently, used to know when the kids were still kids. With music supervision by Jacinth Greywoode, the play’s musical moments are genuinely delightful to listen to and watch unfold, and along with enjoying the humour that they bring, it is easy to get caught up in them, like when Mark beautifully sings “God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman” over the chorus of “A’Soalin’”.
As the play progresses, there is a continual tension between the discord that results when the characters say what is on their minds and the blissful peace that is felt in the room when they sing, which serves as a balm that momentarily heals, or at least masks over, all of their wounds no matter how deep. Similarly, nostalgia-tinged memories of simpler times, like the annual family trips to Shenandoah, are floated as reasons to come together as a family in the present.
There is a propulsive rhythm to Headland’s writing with effective use of overlapping dialogue that captures the hectic energy of a real family gathering and the chaotic vitality of multiple conversations going on at once, as characters pick up on threads of topics that seemed to have already concluded. It is a captivating family portrait, and it is fascinating to watch each character at any given moment, regardless of whether the focus is on them or not. In fact, you could choose one actor to keep your eyes for the entire time that they are on stage and get a rich experience, each actor is that committed and in-the-moment throughout, while the interplay between characters is deftly written and performed. The intimate familiarity with the play that director Trip Cullman has, having previously directed other works by Headland, including the Williamstown and Berkeley Rep productions of Cult of Love, is palpable as he orchestrates every beat like a maestro.
Headland is dead-on in capturing the potential for joy and dread that most festive family gatherings bring, as the resentments of the past and frictions of the present bubble and seethe, while love, history, and family traditions are called forth in an attempt to bind together these fallible humans who are all trying their best in their own ways. While some of the characters might be seriously misguided, there aren’t any villains here. As the Dahl offspring look back on their upbringing, although it might have been claustrophobic and eccentric, many people suffer though much worse, as Bill alludes to with his own childhood. Thoroughly absorbing and bitingly funny, you will likely be glad that this is someone else’s family Christmas that you’re observing from the comfort of your theatre seat, but judging from the frequent noises of recognition in the audience, it is a family dynamic that will resonate with many of us.
By James Kleinmann
Cult of Love officially opened on December 12th, 2024 at the Helen Hayes Theater (240 West 44th street) and runs until February 2nd, 2025. Single tickets and season subscriptions are currently on sale at 2ST.com.