Broken Snow starts with a young, scruffy-looking guy rummaging around a dilapidated winter cottage. He has rumpled clothes, a furtive air, and no apparent concern for the continued survival of furniture. Suddenly, there’s a commotion outside: a strange man is climbing in through the cottage’s window. We get a read on the younger guy’s less-than-manly personality from the way he hides, then peeks around the corner, like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. The men quickly notice each other – the window-climber claims to be an “officer of the law,” but that could mean anything – and before we know it, both guys are pointing guns at each other, claiming the other one is an intruder.

In many dramas, scenes with drawn guns build up to someone getting interrogated, arrested, or shot. In Ben Andron’s compelling, slowly burning (or rather slowly thawing) thriller Broken Snow, playing at Theater 71, this Mexican standoff instead leads to a kind of mutual dude-bro therapy. Our two guys quickly put their guns away and admit that, really, they’re both ultimately mad at their father. And let me be the first to say: good for them. Armed men rarely pause mid-standoff to say “this is really about my dad,” even though it would drastically cut down on most shootings. 

The scruffy, younger guy is James, played by actor and comedian Michael Longfellow, who lots of audience members will know as a cast member (and fan favorite) on Saturday Night Live. James is sarcastic, disarming, and talks a lot. During the guns-drawn standoff, he complains about the "fatigue factor:” “Let’s not forget, I have been holding a gun for, like, five minutes longer than you.” But Longfellow radiates a piercing intelligence, and we realize that James is a lot smarter than he seems; his constant talking is a way of concealing a sharp intellect. The other man – the guy who climbed in through the window – is named Steven, played by veteran actor Tom Cavanagh. Steven claims to be a police officer, and at first he does seem like one: rational, staid, a little humorless. We eventually learn that his air of masculinity and respectability is like mist over a turbulent ocean of emotion. Steven, despite being the older man, is pretty lost in life.

Once the guns are down, the bro-therapy begins, and both guys figure out that they have one big thing in common: they share a dad. Or, rather, they shared a dad – they’ve shown up at this remote winter cottage because their mutual father died two weeks ago, and this was the last place he lived. James and Steven turn out to be long-lost brothers who have both embarked on parallel man-quests, each climbing their own mountain of father issues. And there is a doozy of a dad behind it all: a man named Kris, played in flashbacks by an absolutely terrific, towering Tony Danza. 

Danza plays Kris as a grizzled father who seems like he climbed out of an Elmore Leonard novel and set the book on fire behind him. Kris, we sense, survived a violent past, and, as an adult, carved out a small, shabby existence; his main hobby was emotionally terrorizing his children. Life has carved its lessons into him, one scar at a time, and he passes them on in the form of a brutal creed: no one can be trusted, and everyone’s motives are suspect. In one extended flashback, Kris gives eight-year-old James a cupcake for his birthday. But something is wrong: after a bite, James suddenly begins choking and gasping for breath. Kris makes no attempt to help him. Instead, in a terrifying monotone, he explains to his panicked son that he laced the cupcake with a mild dose of cyanide — not enough to kill James, but enough to shut his body down for a few minutes. The point of this ordeal, Kris explains, was to teach James never to accept anything from anyone. (Especially if it contains gluten.)

Danza shuffles on and off stage, speaking in an eloquent growl. As much as we know he’s a bastard, we can’t help but listen closely when he talks. He seems almost like a mystical being, like someone who’s lived a thousand lives and is possessed with special knowledge. He’s like a vampire, or an evil sorcerer, or some other Danza-creature from the black lagoon. We understand the psychic vise his memory still exerts on his grown children. Kris’s imperious presence is heightened by the lighting design, effects, and Colin Hanlon’s direction, which transforms the winter cottage into a forbidding prison of childhood memory. A striking recurring effect accompanies almost every entrance by Tony Danza: a sudden surge of cold, wintry air that we hear, see, and almost physically feel. It’s like an atmospheric leitmotif of his presence, like lightning forking whenever Dracula shows up. The flashbacks are equally effective; I felt fully immersed in James and Steven’s memories. 

The play has the thrust of a thriller, but the depth of a psychological drama; over its runtime, Longfellow and Cavanagh’s characters go from pointing guns at each other to plumbing the depths of each others’ childhood trauma. (Just some classic brother stuff.) And the final, horrible revelation of what Kris went through – his Rosebud – would feel implausible, if Broken Snow didn’t so carefully and patiently build toward it. When Tony Danza finally lays it out what happened to him in an extended, visceral monologue, I was genuinely shocked – but also totally bought it. (I won’t spoil what happened to him as a kid. Let’s just say it’s worse than chicken pox.) 

It’s really fun to watch Longfellow and Cavanagh’s characters move from mutual distrust to a reluctant, fraternal alliance. There is nothing cooler than when brothers team up. And Ben Andron’s script is remarkably patient – but not boring – in its expert uncoiling of Kris’s past, as James and Steven work together toward a series of shocking realizations about their dad. Broken Snow opens at gunpoint, but builds a world in which its characters are far more afraid of unbidden memories than anything unfolding in the present. It is a play where feelings, memory, and truth carry more force than any event in real time. And it has left me, unexpectedly, a little afraid of Tony Danza.