Monstrosity as Symptom in Celine Song’s “Family”
Izabel Mar and Luis Feliciano in Family by Celine Song. Directed by Alec Duffy. Presented by Hoi Polloi and Amanda + James. © Maria Baranova
In New York, a city full of shows in every church basement and public park, it takes something extraordinarily special to leave onlookers speechless. And yet, this fall, the twenty audience members at the brownstone being used for Hoi Polloi’s Family sat in stunned silence as the show ended, soft “holy shit”s echoing across the room.
This is the only acceptable reaction to Family, a surrealist masterpiece written as the MFA thesis by Celine Song, whose film Past Lives was nominated at the 96th Academy Awards. Directed by the Obie Award-winning Alec Duffy, the show treats its absurdism with complete sobriety. The play follows three half-siblings who live in the house their father built following his funeral. Linus’s (Jonah O’Hara-David) mother was an 8’3” astronaut who is “up there” now; David’s (Luis Feliciano) mother was a “freak” covered in a thick layer of hair, and Alice’s (alternating between Izabel Mar and Violet Savage) had a second face in the back of her head. The three protagonists speak in rhythmic, proclamatory sentences and hiss and buzz in unison. Their strangeness, at odds with the warmth and regularity of the house, strips away the family’s sentimental veil to expose something dark and disgusting in its place.
Izabel Mar, Jonah O’Hara-David, and Luis Feliciano in Family by Celine Song. Directed by Alec Duffy. Presented by Hoi Polloi and Amanda + James. © Maria Baranova
The intimacy of the site-specific space enables masterful direction by Duffy, elevating Song’s already electrifying script to become intimate, the trauma believable. Audience members meet twenty minutes before the show at a Clinton Hill bar, and are escorted on a brief walk to the bottom floor of a townhouse, trendy with its exposed brick and built-in bookshelves. (Mimi Lien, the scenic design consultant, is the third credit in the program.) When, at the very beginning of the show, Alice speaks about hearing voices in the walls, whispers come from each of her brothers across the room. “Your father was a good man,” Linus says. “Your father was a wonderful man,” echoes David. “Your father was a hard-working man.” None of the siblings look at each other, and each rests at a different spot in the apartment—Linus by the kitchen, David under the piano. When the whispers begin, they surround us from all sides, and audiences are struck with claustrophobia. In a world as confined as theirs, incest and abuse become the natural conclusion. Duffy traps us there with it. When the siblings take a hammer and pry the floorboards up, it acts as a literal deconstruction of their family, an exposition of the violence that has been lurking underneath them their entire lives. Hoi Polloi, the collaborative theater company formed by Duffy in 2007, has made us ghosts in the haunted house that has imprisoned this family.
Luis Feliciano and Izabel Mar in Family by Celine Song. Directed by Alec Duffy. Presented by Hoi Polloi and Amanda + James. © Maria Baranova
Family comes, of course, with baggage—we inherit from our parents just as our children inherit from us, a self-perpetuating cycle. “Why is Linus a terrible person?” Alice asks at the end of the play, after Linus has finished hitting, kicking, and scratching David just as his father did to David’s mother. “Because his father was a terrible person!” Alice responds to her own question. This declaration, at odds with the opening whispers, comes after we’ve heard half an hour of their father’s implied misdeeds, which Song writes with brilliant ambiguity. Linus’s mother, of course, is not actually an astronaut—she was, in all likelihood, choked by their father, just as we must read between the lines to learn that David's mother did not actually “fall down the stairs,” but was routinely abused. The facts about Alice’s mother are told to us directly, perhaps because the sexual assault and incest are both too violent to imply. That she is a product of a relationship between sister and brother, however, destabilizes the very definitions of “family.” We are left with something so twisted it is unrecognizable.
It is hard to have a point in a work of surrealist theater—all too often, meaning gets sacrificed for the sake of a bewilderment of the senses. But here, Song has achieved the impossible. At the end of the play, when Linus and Alice are about to have sex, he tells her that she is a monster. It is thirty or so pages after David, a linguist, monologues to the audience about the ancient origins of the “monster,” sent as punishment and omens of a people’s misguided ways. As Alice continues to tear off her brother’s clothes, we are left with the feeling that this is not their fault—they are a product of the violence they were born into. They are monsters, they are “freaks,” but they are also symptoms. As a playwright, Song is in the business of provoking reactions, and this is perhaps the most successful she has ever been. Family inflames both our guts and our minds. You’ve never seen anything like it. Holy shit.
Jonah O’Hara-David and Izabel Mar in Family by Celine Song. Directed by Alec Duffy. Presented by Hoi Polloi and Amanda + James. © Maria Baranova
