Ali Viterbi’s “In Every Generation,” now in a world premiere at the Victory Gardens Theatre, is a new entry in one of the American theater’s most indestructible genres: the dinner-table play in which intergenerational family members air their differences as they break bread and share wine.
So it goes here as a family gathers for a Seder in the California home of Valeria (Eli Katz), now a single mom after the exit of her husband for another’s Passover table. The remaining family at the table is also struggling. The Jewish-Italian patriarch, Holocaust survivor Davide (Paul Dillon) is in ill health and near comatose, even though his aged wife Paola (Carmen Roman) is doing her best to compensate and offer some cheery glue for the grandkids at the celebratory meal.
But the focus of the first act is on the two sisters, alternately affectionate and warring. Nineteen-year-old Yael (Esther Fishbein) has returned home from Yale (the alma mater of the playwright) and wants to discuss Jewish identity in the context of progressive campus politics, as in the morality of claiming victimhood when, she asserts, all of that was a long time ago and Jews now have to embrace their own privilege and stand at the side of others with better claims. Her sister Dev (Sarah Lo), is both an adopted child into the family and far more embracing of her Jewish spiritual identity, even pondering rabbinical school. For much of the first act, the two sisters go at it, making their various cases as Viterbi links their different sisterly points of view to their alignments in their parent’s divorce. Meanwhile, the older generation offers wise thoughts in Italian accents.
The act has its moments in director Devon De Mayo’s minimally staged production, but it’s hard to imagine anyone being disappointed at the arrival of intermission, not least because the battle between the sisters always seems to be occurring with the dial very far to the danger zone of overheating. This feels much like a play born of an MFA and an Ivy League education, a young writer’s likely autobiographical piece about the difficulty of then returning to a world removed from these issues that inform almost every second of a campus life, but later become subsumed by issues of mortality, complexity and, well, nuance.
Viterbi, to her credit, begins to flesh out those issues in the more complicated and ambitious second act, when she looks first at the original Stateside arrival of the older generation in a moving scene, played with real charm here by Roman and Dillon. Then, she heads to future to imagine the sisters as adults in 2050, still fighting out their issues. Finally, the play goes way back into the Old Testament past, as far as 1416 BCE, although anachronisms abound in this final scene, still a look at the same family.
It’s all an admirable effort from an interesting writer whose best work, I suspect, remains ahead. The production also has its moments, including a typically warm performance from Roman and some powerful work from Lo, a name to watch.
But there are many times when all of this feels too much, when none of the characters are sufficiently empathetic, when all the shouting and fighting gives you a headache and when you wonder why no one here thought more to leaven the first act with more humor and humanity and truth. You further wish that the younger performers had taken more of a cue from their older fellow cast members, dialed back all the shouting and explored more about how the harshest and deepest wounds we inflict are emotional ones, not verbal wins.
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Certainly, these matters of identity, and who has a fair claim to what and when, are interesting and important and much-discussed at Seders. But in the sands of time, they dissipate as personal loss takes over from debates and campus declarations and young people learn of many things being true at once.
I think Viterbi understands that this is why many of us seek out the theater, to understand the clash of mind and heart, of the macro and the personal, but it will take yet more boldness on her part and yet more attention to what the audience might feel, rather than just what her characters have to say. She’s talented; let’s hope she finds that courage.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “In Every Generation”
When: Through May 1
Where: Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2243 N. Lincoln Ave.
Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes,
Tickets: $29–62 at 773-871-3000 and victorygardens.org.