Review: "Lake George" Traverses Some Choppy Familial Waters

Lake George

Written and directed by Dan Blick

Presented by Telos Ensemble at Chain Theatre

312 West 36 Street, Floor 4, Manhattan, NYC

March 5-16, 2025

Tora Hallström and Samantha Positano. Photo courtesy of Telos Ensemble.
Lake George, returning to the NYC stage for a second run at the Chain Theatre, tempts one to grant that, indeed, nothing is funnier than unhappiness. Focused on a group of family members who are brutally honest about one another but less so about themselves, writer and director Dan Blick's play never loses sight of the tragic dimensions of its characters, no matter how hilarious many of their barbed exchanges may be. The production also never loses the excellently judged pace and rhythm that serve this tragicomic triumph so well right through its true-to-life refusal to tidy away loose ends before its final moments.

The titular Lake George is the setting for a family weekend at a rented house, and the first members of the family whom we meet are husband and wife Tom (Mitchell Pope) and Alana (Tora Hallström). When Tom reads Alana some of the new novel that he is working on, she decides that she doesn't care for it rather too quickly for Tom, who views what she says is simply honesty as a habit of harshness and insensitivity. Additionally, for what is clearly not the first time that the couple have disagreed over the topic, Tom accuses Alana of being jealous of her sister Clara (Samantha Positano). The set, designed by Blick and Pope, is centered on a dining table, and an incident involving it during this opening conversation symbolically suggests some of the (inter)personal brokenness to come.
L to R: Saadiq Vaughan, Gil Cole, Samantha Positano (front), Tora Hallström, and Mitchell Pope.  Photo courtesy of Telos Ensemble.
Soon enough, Alana and Clara's father, Jonathan (Gil Cole), arrives with his newest and much younger "friend," Matthew (Saadiq Vaughan) unexpectedly in tow. Jonathan's muted reaction to bad news from Alana about his ex-wife and the manner in which he asks about the current status of Clara's past issues with drug use hint at what Jonathan identifies as a lack of histrionics but we might see as long standing emotional avoidance. Clara herself, who delights in provoking people and has been known to appropriate others' belongings, rounds out the weekend guests, along with Tom and Alana's unseen baby, asleep upstairs. With everyone together, resentments both old and new emerge, about marriage, about Tom's writing career, about whether the family are too soft on Clara's behavior, and more, building to a crisis point that comes when Tom and Clara are trapped alone at the rental house without cell service and that reverberates through the remainder of the show.
Samantha Positano. Photo courtesy of Telos Ensemble.
While Alana and Clara begin the play in contrasting dark and light tops, respectively, Matthew and Jonathan arrive both clad in red shirts, a visual gesture towards their being perhaps one of the healthier of the relationships that we see, despite Jonathan's children's criticism; Matthew, the one outsider, is arguably also the most self-aware (and even-keeled) of the characters and has a perspective on the entire family that they themselves (probably as a survival instinct) lack. Vaughan imbues Matthew with a calm dignity that gives weight to that perspective, while Pope's performance artfully paints Tom in shades of haplessness and sympathetic frustration at increasingly feeling like an unloved outsider despite ostensibly being part of this clan. Cole's turn as Jonathan makes clear that this father can be aggravating and withholding but is also trying to find his own happiness as an individual, and Hallström and Positano are both outstanding as sisters whose means of concealing their vulnerabilities are ultimately not that different. Lake George offers a snapshot of the toxic nexus of broken or interrupted lines of communication, difficulties expressing and perhaps receiving love, and thwarted desires for different types of approval that dog one family's relationships. And with its sharply drawn characters trading sharp-edged dialogue, it is tremendously entertaining in doing so.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

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