Thistles isn’t a ghost story. But at the center of Cyndy A. Marion’s play is a house that’s haunted. Haunted not so much by the shades of the dead, but by the frustrated or beaten-down spirits of the living. A family’s battle over the fate of a decrepit homestead fuels the drama (and comedy) of this moving pandemic-era story.
Thistles
While the old farmhouse centers the scenario, the heart of the action lies in Mel House’s powerhouse performance as Rebecca. She’s a legal researcher who has fled the city, leaving her life partner behind for now, to ride out the worst of the pre-vaccine COVID-19 pandemic on the old farm. The property has been in her family for a century, and she has fond memories of spending time there as a child. But no one has lived there since her grandmother’s death 15 years before and the place has fallen into disrepair.
Rebecca’s main purpose in decamping for the country is to try, on behalf of herself and her cognitively impaired mother, to convince her aunt and uncle that it’s finally time to sell the property. The house has become a money pit that from Rebecca’s point of view is doing no one any good. The family still gathers there for Christmas, which is imminent, but nothing else.
Rebecca meets ands starts to bond with a nervous neighbor, Laney (a shakily effective Lisa Bostnar), who may be closeting something more than her sexuality. The masks they at first wear clearly set the time of the action, just as the cawing crows and creaking windows wafting through the air set the sense of place. (The atmospheric sound design is by Andy Evan Cohen.)
Secrets
Rebecca then begins a fraught scrimmage with the nosy and somewhat frightening Alan (Rod Sweitzer), who has parlayed his rental of the family’s garage into an inappropriate involvement in its financial affairs. She clashes with her uncle Peter (Gordon Stanley), whose secrecy and stubborn attachment to the house pose Rebecca’s biggest obstacles. Aunt Lucinda (a hilarious Leslie Alexander) finally arrives with the Christmas decorations, bringing a burst of comedy that’s quickly undercut as the story crashes to a climax.
The action progresses in mostly short scenes. Rebecca is part of all but one of them, and it’s the (coincidentally named) House’s focused performance that knits everything together – really, that makes the play as effective as it is.
Directed pointedly by Dev Bondarin, the production sustains a tricky balance of tragedy and comedy most of the way. The action does drag a little in the second act. Revelations about Alan’s past flesh out the character but distract from the matter at hand. And while the pandemic comes up in conversation more than once, psychologically it fades so far into the background that the characters sometimes seem to forget about it a bit too much for comfort – or for realism. (On the other hand, I would be complaining about intelligibility if the actors wore masks the whole time, so there’s that.)
For Rebecca, the LGBTQ aspect of the story is mostly background. But it’s key to Laney’s storyline as a closeted lesbian in an insular and lily-white Pennsylvania town plastered with Trump signs. As such it forms another thread in the tangle that Rebecca claws into on her quest to shed some of the ghosts of her past. And when her sense that her family is falling apart gets an all-too-literal validation, we’re right with her.
Thistles is at 59e59 Theaters through Dec. 1. Tickets are available online.
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