Maggie Bofill's new comedy Winners is an intimately scoped, ambitiously plotted, tender screaming match, and broadly nuanced character piece -- and boy does that seem like a lot of paradoxes. We are trafficking in familiar stories here. Father, Brian (Grant Shaud), out of a job; Mother, Mabel (Florencia Lozano), a new-minted career woman. Their marriage: strained, causing collateral damage to Teen Tommy (Dave Gelles) and Tween Basket Case/Performance Artist/Voyeur Gabby (Arielle Goldman). When Tommy loses his job at The Gap his old manager and old co-worker, the sinisterly smarmy Bill (Scott Sowers) gives Brian his son's old position. Mabel, naturally, will later leverage Bill's priss-perky wife, Lily's (Polly Lee) position at Gabby's old private school to curry favor for a scholarship and of course, Tommy has a score to settle with Bill. I risk reducing the play to plot points, but there are so many they could capably fill three more plays and this is without paying lip service to the peripheral action of the animal life (Curran Connor in a love-able if underused turn as dog Buck, and Stephanie Hsu as a sassy beat poet cat hunting her White Whale of a fly) and we can really connect the dots ourselves.
Ms. Bofill knows how to set up her pins, but often has poor timing in knocking them down. We hit the de rigeur themes of infidelity, kids forced to grow up too fast, a tin-eared marriage and hard-knock economy, but in hitting all the marks the plot gets diverted. When a sitcom scenario dinner with the boss promises a panacea for all the characters we must first wade through a dispute over an emergency credit card, which is a shame because it causes one of the better moments to lose steam. As much as I would love to celebrate the theatrics of Gabby's Christmas Play -- cribbed lovingly, it seems, from The King And I if the King is Herod and the subject the biblical Slaughter of the Innocents -- there's too much narrative ballast and an earlier scene giving her too similar a moment for it to truly hit its mark.
Pamela Berlin's direction manages some nuance in a play with a lot of broad strokes and the cast is to be commended for their energy in bounding, yelling, being merry and even playing Polonius in Scenic Designer Jason Simms' many closets and hallways. But coming near curtain, when Gabby pulled the detritus of many a story thread from a big old sack and forced her not-so-perfect family into tableau I felt a lot like the bag: a bit deflated, and happy to be free of the bloat.
