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    Review: In ‘Find Me Here,’ Sisters Grapple With a Father’s Will, and His Legacy

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    A family gathering fuels Crystal Finn’s new play, in which an excellent cast teases out the many complications of inheritance.Weddings, anniversaries, holidays: The family get-together is a dramatic gift that keeps on giving to both screen and stage. Crystal Finn’s new play, “Find Me Here,” at Wild Project, falls into a subcategory of the funerals subgenre — the opening of a will. In this case, a patriarch’s last wishes are discovered by his three daughters and their families. Truths and conflicts emerge gingerly, almost tentatively, because Finn is less interested in confrontation than in gentle poking and prodding.Unfortunately, “Find Me Here,” the third and final installment of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks 2024, is also unwilling to commit to any particular point. Its cast, however, including Constance Shulman, Miriam Silverman and Frank Wood, is so good that the production feels like the theater equivalent of handing Formula 1 drivers keys to an economy sedan. The actors are experts, but there is only so much the vehicle can do.The story revolves around the siblings Nancy (Lizbeth Mackay), Dee-Dee (Shulman) and Deborah (Kathleen Tolan), whose ages range from the mid-60s to the early 70s. Deborah is the oldest and has spent the past 30 years on an island, having followed a guru there. Tolan gives her the beatific mien of someone who can see a light invisible to others, which contrasts nicely with the acerbic Dee-Dee and the stressed-out Nancy.The will’s most consequential revelation is that Deborah was left nothing, an outcome she shrugs off. When Nancy tells Deborah that their father did love her, Dee-Dee says, “Well that’s … we just don’t know … he did, Deborah.”Mind you, Nancy also calls their father a tyrant and says that when she informed him that she was getting divorced, he replied, “Three daughters, and not one of them a success.”Though there are three sisters in the play, Finn (who was in the cast of “Usus,” the first installment of Summerworks 2024) doesn’t nod toward Chekhov so much as to some kind of American portraiture painted in small, innocuous brushstrokes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Munich Medea: Happy Family’ Review: A Friendship Crushed by the Past

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      Themes of incest and sexual abuse of minors loom large in this strikingly becalmed play named after a legendarily vengeful Greek mother.“Munich Medea: Happy Family” carries the wrong trigger warning. Rather than cautioning us that Corinne Jaber’s debut play “addresses, but does not depict, sexual assault,” it should warn us that its tropes will be ploddingly predictable to just about anyone who has seen the #MeToo movement play out in recent years.On opposite sides of a sparsely furnished split-level stage, two women, Caroline and Alice, tell us about the dissolution of their childhood friendship after they were sexually abused by the same man. While the script seems to be pitched somewhere between a memory play and an exorcism, what unfolds onstage, under the director Lee Sunday Evans’s light touch, is as dry and sober as a deposition — with its mentions of consent (uttered 10 times in the play’s 75 minutes), forensic descriptions of rape and clockwork-like moments of catharsis. For a play named after a legendarily vengeful Greek mother, “Munich Medea” (a co-production of PlayCo and WP Theater) is a strikingly domesticated and becalmed production.This is not to say that mothers come off entirely well in this play. At one point, Caroline (a granite-faced Crystal Finn) — looking back on the abuse that her father (a louche Kurt Rhoads) inflicted on her best friend, Alice (Heather Raffo) — reflects that “none of this would’ve happened” without her mother’s consent, “which she gave, always, willingly and silently.” Her mother never materializes in the play. That the mother is effectively silenced could be a way for her daughter to exact poetic revenge, by silencing the person who wove a conspiracy of silence around her husband’s crimes. But the play is not wily enough to ambush the accomplice in her own trap.Alice’s own mother, a refugee from East Germany, is also conspicuously absent. A more sympathetic character, she’s described as a “virtuous, well-behaved Protestant” who once confronted Caroline’s father, asking him to leave her daughter alone, to no avail. As played by Rhoads, the father (he is given no proper name) is a silver-tongued theater actor who spends much of the play in his dressing room, elevated about 10 feet above the floor. Lines from Friedrich Schiller rain down on us from his lair, and even in old age, he has no trouble quoting Georg Büchner and Rainer Maria Rilke from memory. As with Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous pedophile, Humbert Humbert, the father in “Munich Medea” seems to believe that aesthetic ingenuity more than makes up for ethical lapses.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More