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At some point in the past decade, the living-room play turned into the kitchen play.
What we once used as visual shorthand for American domesticitythe couchhas become the kitchen table.
If theres a sofa in a new play now, usually its a satire about the upper crust.
Secrets are boiling away, though, just like the stew.
Howards second layer is the meaty stuff of melodrama.
Where are the men in this world?
Theyre represented by the trouble they cause.
The phone rings and rings, and the news is almost never good.
For a long time, were kept busy unearthing the small tragedies under the comedy.
Existentially, somethings amiss.
Why, for instance, do all the women have versions of the same name?
Why do they fall into so many of the same patterns?
Is their closeness genetic?
Or is some other slippage happeningthe traumas of generations actually fusing, somehow, into one another?
Richard was a master of misdirection too.
Still, its the performances that youll remember.
But Portia is the jewel.
The play hasnt shifted at this point; we still think its a rollicking family entertainment.
Yet out of nowhere, Portia summons up an entire tragedy.
Its also a precise fusion of performance and composition.
Howard makes us hear hundreds of years of pain, knocking to be let in.
And Portiashaking with effortis the door.
Stewis at Walkerspace through February 22.
