What do you do when you can’t figure out what, exactly, was your dad’s problem? That’s the central question in Broken Snow, a slowly burning thriller playing at Theater 71, written by Ben Andron, directed by Colin Hanlon and starring Tony Danza – yes, sweet, comical, shambolic Tony Danza of Who’s The Boss? - in an absolutely terrific, towering breakthrough performance. 

Broken Snow starts with a standoff.  A young, scruffy-looking guy is rummaging around a dilapidated winter cottage. He has rumpled clothes, a furtive air, and no concern for the continued survival of the furniture. Suddenly, there’s a commotion outside: a strange man is climbing in through the cottage’s window. Before we know it, both guys are pointing guns at each other, claiming the other one is an intruder.

In a typical drama, scenes with drawn guns build up to someone getting interrogated, arrested, or shot. But this impasse 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 chatty, disarming and sarcastic. While pointing a gun at the older man, he complains that he’s fatigued. “Let’s not forget, I have been holding a gun for, like, five minutes longer than you.” But Longfellow radiates a piercing intelligence; his constant talking is a way of concealing a sharp intellect. The other, older man – the guy who climbs through the window – is named Steven, played by veteran actor Tom Cavanagh. Steven claims (falsely) 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 is pretty lost in life.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
Once the guns are down, 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. The cottage was the last place he lived; he may have left a clue there, some way of answering the mystery of why he was such a colossal prick. James and Steven turn out to be long-lost brothers, each climbing their own mountain of father issues. And the doozy of a dad behind it all is Kris, played in flashbacks wonderfully against-type 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. It’s clear that Kris 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. After a bite, James suddenly begins choking and gasping for breath. Kris doesn’t help him. Instead, in a terrifying monotone, he says that he laced the cupcake with a mild dose of cyanide — not enough to kill James, but enough to shut down his body for a few minutes. The point, Kris explains, was to teach James never to accept anything from anyone. Michael Longfellow and Tom Cavanagh play the younger versions of themselves and are completely convincing.  Cavanagh, in particular, transforms before our eyes from a man in his fifties into one in his twenties, shedding layers of self-assurance and experience.

Danza shuffles on and off stage, wrapped in an oversized overcoat, his hair snow white, speaking in an eloquent growl.  A striking effect accompanies almost every one of Kris’s entrances: a sudden surge of cold, wintry air that we hear, see, and almost physically feel, the kind of effect that announces monsters. As big a sociopath as Kris is, some of Danza’s good guy humanity peeks through; he’s weirdly sympathetic and human at times. Kris is wrought by regret (he apologizes to both sons separately in flashbacks) and seemingly haunted by something in the past. It’s not clear how strong his grip on reality is. “I can’t run anymore,” he tells James in a flashback. ”The serpent always finds you, no matter what you do. It's the key to everything! The serpent with the black feathery wings!" Part of why Broken Snow works so well is because the audience wants to understand who Kris is almost as much as his sons do. We understand the psychic vise his memory still exerts on his grown children. The intensity of Danza's 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. 

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. 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 a ten minute riveting monologue, I was genuinely shocked.

It’s really fun to watch Longfellow and Cavanagh’s characters move from mutual distrust to a reluctant, fraternal alliance.  And Ben Andron’s script expertly uncoils 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.