A FAMILY AFFAIR
Worse yet, though A Family Affair is a fine example of the reliable comedy formula of the fox outfoxed, Ostrovsky had the temerity to depict a property crime without providing a proper punishment.
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As if Ostrovsky were punishing Bolshov’s upwardly mobile cheating, he’s given the merchant just the family he deserves, a horror clan right out of The Little Foxes–Lipochka, a snobbish, acid-tongued, gold-digging daughter, and Agrafena, Bolshov’s prudish, hysterical wife. Members of this family snake pit repeatedly exchange paint-peeling insults with venomous delight. (The pungent adaptation by British playwright Nick Dear, author of The Art of Success, is as corrosively idiomatic as Ostrovsky could have wished.)
In any case it’s pure catnip for cunning actors, and Charles Harper’s staging for Strawdog Theatre teems with caricatures as sharp as Daumier’s. Topping the list of cartoons is rubber-faced George Lugg’s nasty-as-he-wants-to-be Bolshov, a commercial thug with a devastatingly deadpan and snarlingly sour puss. Lugg gives no quarter to his character, and his mean machine feels rancidly right.
