SOCIAL SECURITY
at the Avenue Theatre
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To begin with, the production provides almost no dramatic tension. Lines are read without emphasis. Actors’ faces go blank when they’re not speaking. No one seems to listen when spoken to. Everyone more or less knows the lines, and no one trips over the furniture, but of the seven actors in the show only Michael Wasserman as David and Roma Mann as Mom play their roles as if they were imitating real people.
Stephanie Weinberg as Barbara seems particularly out of her element on the stage. She mumbles key lines, pauses awkwardly while delivering punch lines–“Do not ask for whom the, uh, walker thumps. [Long pause.] It thumps for thee”–and generally talks, moves, and acts in a way wholly unlike what you might expect from the witty wife of a sophisticated gallery owner. Such a botched performance would really stick out in most productions. In director Hyman Mann’s ultrarough offering, however, Weinberg’s moments of awkwardness are merely par for the course. Arthur Weinberg as the accountant brother-in-law delivers all his lines with the same bland facial expression, with the result that when he’s supposed to be angry he looks calm, even bored.
The fault lies almost entirely with Athanasiades’s silly, melodramatic, utterly unbelievable play, about a spoiled woman in her 20s who returns home to her family “for financial reasons” and immediately sets about driving them crazy so she can inherit the house, sell it, and open an ad agency.
Such lapses in the dialogue might be forgivable if the story made any sense, or if the characters were credible or interesting. But it doesn’t and they aren’t. Fred and Laurie are as dull as the cliches they spout. Genevieve is painted as such an absolute monster–spoiled, selfish, and pathologically manipulative–that there’s no possibility of getting to know the woman behind the villain. The playwright never gives any explanation of how such sweet, bland parents could spawn a child so insensitive she thinks nothing of telling her mother she has a diaphragm because it’s “the easiest way to fuck,” or of revealing to her boyfriend that she lost her job because “they accused me of fu–of having sex in the office.”
