What kind of woman, sitting next to her husband as he lies dying in a hospital bed, would talk about redecorating her living room?
That would be Rita Lyons, the narcissistic, suffocating, boisterous matriarch of the deeply troubled Jewish family at the heart of “The Lyons,” a darkly comic Nicky Silver play at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre.
Buoyed by a strong script and finely nuanced performances, it’s an excellent choice to kick off the theater’s Global Age Project, which will continue with staged readings of three new plays that, like “The Lyons,” explore life in the 21st century and beyond.
“The Lyons” was a hit on Broadway in 2012, nominated for several major awards, including two for Linda Lavin, who played Rita. It’s the first of Silver’s many plays to make it to Broadway, although some of his past productions, such as “Pterodactyls” and “The Agony and the Agony,” have been staged at prestigious regional theaters. His work always has the same comic bite, which the playwright is fond of relating to his own identity as (how he puts it) a fat gay man from Philadelphia.
The Lyons function — or rather, dysfunction — like a stereotypical well-off, and probably well-medicated, suburban Jewish family simply in the way they relate to each other, openly airing their fears, hostilities and desperate needs, the stuff that more “proper” families might paper over with fake smiles and strained politesse.
Rita and Ben, her husband of 40 years, don’t have the time or patience for that. As Rita prattles on and on about her redecorating project — “Excellent taste, like goyim,” she comments admiringly about a living room displayed in her magazine — Ben, trapped by the bed to which illness confines him, can only vent his frustrations via constant expletives, none of which deter his wife in the least. It’s clear they’re grown accustomed to this combative relationship.
The arrival of their daughter, Lisa, a recovered alcoholic escaping an abusive marriage, and then their son, Curtis, gay and permanently unemployed, sets off a hospital-room quadrille wherein the parents alternately gang up on and vie for the attentions of their emotionally stunted children.
The play, and this production, turn on the character of Rita, here portrayed with deliciously barbed wit by Ellen Ratner. Ratner squeezes all the nuance she can out of every line, thoroughly enjoying telling her daughter that Ben’s cancer “is EVERYwhere,” and then suggesting that Lisa “put it out of your mind, let’s have a nice visit, all right?”
If a Jewish mother’s prime directive is to find a mate for her single daughter, Rita goes it one better by trying to fix Lisa up with a patient down the hall — he’s Jewish, “a nice boy,” never mind that he’s in the end stages of lymphoma.
Lisa and Curtis clearly have been damaged by the push-pull turbulence of their family dynamic, and are as inwardly focused in their concerns as are their parents. Lisa’s reaction to the news of her father’s impending demise is not worry over his condition, but anger at not being told earlier. And Curtis is intent on baiting his homophobic father to buttress his own self-congratulatory victimhood.
The Aurora cast, directed by Barbara Damashek, turns Silver’s excellent script into theater gold. The timing is impeccable, the action constant, the tension palpable. The four Lyons talk loudly, often over each other, trading insults and riding waves of hysteria and despair with equal aplomb. Oh, they’re a piece of work, this family!
“The Lyons,” through March 8 at Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley. Ticket prices vary. www.auroratheatre.org