Review: "Broken Thread" Composes an Étude of Loose Ends

Broken Thread

Written by D-Davis

Directed by Miles Sternfeld

Presented by Eden Theater Company at The 14Y Theater

344 E 14th St., Manhattan, NYC

January 9-February 1, 2025

L to R: Laura Lee Botsacos, Ella Raymond, Alyssa LaVacca (rear); Jenna Krasowski and Sydney Kamel (front). Photo courtesy of Kampfire PR
Sometimes the thing we love, even need, the most can become at the same time a kind of trap; for the characters in playwright D-Davis's Broken Thread, this is true of both family and, for one family member, art. Playing music provides the talented Adeline (Jenna Krasowski) one of her deepest sources of joy and one of her best means of expression, including for feelings and experiences that she can't otherwise articulate, but simultaneously and inseparably acts as a vehicle for intense pressure by her mother, Therese (Laura Lee Botsacos). How this duality affects Adeline and her relationships with her mother and three sisters over multiple decades forms the core of this play, currently being presented by Eden Theater Company at The 14Y Theater in repertory with two other plays from The Femme Collective, a collaboration among Eden, Multistages, and The Neo-Political Cowgirls.
Jenna Krasowski and Alyssa LaVacca. Photo courtesy of Kampfire PR 
In Broken Thread, the device of the photographic family portrait works simultaneously as a frame for the play as a whole, an inspiration for some striking imagery and staging, and a delineation of a specific period in time in the history of the family and the individuals whom it comprises. The play opens with the audience in the place of photographers being met at the door by barefoot Zander (Ella Raymont)–the cast is periodically oriented towards the audience in this way, to good effect–who has returned to her mother's home for a once annual family portrait that has missed being annual for a few years. Zander is the second oldest of the family's four daughters and a restless, gender-fluid contrast to the eldest, Aurora (Alyssa LaVacca), who, married and pregnant with her first child, seems to have absorbed a lot of their mother's ideas about keeping up (traditionally feminine) appearances. The status- and achievement-conscious Therese's conviction that it is incumbent upon women to display "cultural prowess" is partly responsible for her insistence that all four of her daughters have music lessons, even if Zander was and is more interested in photography and Camille (Sydney Kamel), the youngest, was more invested in dance team in her school days.
L to R: Alyssa LaVacca, Sydney Kamel, and Ella Raymont. Photo courtesy of Kampfire PR
From its present gathering, the first of the family in awhile and minus their father, the play hops back and forth in time, filling us in on the arc of these women's lives (the few male characters, the father, a clinician, and a teacher, respectively appear onstage not at all, in voiceover [D. B. Miliken], and, in a fittingly unsettling segment, as a voiceover [D. B. Milliken] pantomimed by Raymont). Over the years, the closeness of child siblings gives way to what Camille aptly calls "sibling distance" and, as if not more importantly, implicit competition, extending into the disappointments of adulthood. It can be difficult to live in the shadow of Adeline, or Addy as they more familiarly call her, who combines natural talent with an unceasing drive to improve. Can Camille being named dance captain hope to be as impressive to their mother as an audition for Julliard? What does it mean for someone like Aurora to love and pursue perfection in her own playing but know that she can never reach Addy's level and to be shunted off towards a career in finance by her family, much as the photography-loving Zander has ended up working in accounting. But, in line with the play's point that siblings are still individuals, with different perspectives and experiences of the world–something that seems obvious but easily forgotten: Zander, for example, points to the question of how many siblings would be friends if they were not related–Addy is not merely the golden child. In addition to the pressure from her mother, her path in life is inflected by a predatory male figure in high school and later, and relatedly, by addiction.
L to R: Alyssa LaVacca, Sydney Kamel, Ella Raymont (around piano) and Jenna Krasowski (atop piano). Photo courtesy of Kampfire PR
At the center of all this, thematically as well as physically, is the piano in the living room of the family home. The production is saturated with music–often played live at the piano that is the only object aside from a handful of chairs on the minimalist set. Even Addy's introduction to hard drugs is accomplished with the assurance that lots of the jazz greats used them. The black piano and chairs are cordoned within a box of rope lights, which effect a large part of Willem Hinterhoff's excellent, color-soaked lighting design. The lighting also punctuates the action with incandescent flashes as from a camera, and rear-wall projections of photographs from different stages of the women's lives sometimes offer their own punctuation. The cast adeptly captures the crosstalk and cross-purposes, the currents of love and resentment, acknowledged or otherwise, that seem unavoidable when family members are together. The layered performances of Botsacos and LaVacca don't soften the hard edges of their characters, Kamel reveals hidden reserves of emotion in the baby of the family, and Raymont plays Zander at the intersection of the family's outsider and its conscience, while Krasowski realizes Addy's triumphs and tribulations, whether the carefree enthusiasm of childhood or an all-too-mature artistic numbness, with affecting acuteness. As we learn over the course of the play why this particular family portrait is so important to Therese, we reach an ending that is also explicitly a beginning, a point in time that offers but by no means assures the possibility of a better way forward.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

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