Family
Written by Celine Song; Directed by Alec Duffy
The Downstairs at LaMama | 66 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003
September 12 through September 28
Photos by Bronwen Sharp
Family, Celine Song’s lacerating plunge into the rot beneath the floorboards of American domesticity, is not a play so much as it is an invocation. Fevered, airless, and almost incantatory in its repetitions, it envelops the viewer in a miasma of psychic mildew and bloodline trauma, like stepping into a house where the wallpaper peels from the weight of unspoken crimes. Directed by the ever-inventive Alec Duffy, what was once played as a site-specific production planting its poisoned roots in a sumptuous Brooklyn townhouse is now in an encore production at La MaMa’s Downstairs Theatre, but this time somewhat appropriately set in a large cage.
Song’s text vibrates at a pitch so high it may only be heard by feral children and ghosts. And if, somewhere in the house’s many sealed rooms, Sylvia Plath’s spectral presence curls itself into a dark corner, whispering about fathers and ovens—well, that seems fitting. This is Southern Gothic for the Northern boroughs, a mythology stitched together from incestuous lineages, unnatural mothers, and domestic brutality that pulses like a second heartbeat beneath the floor.
The play offers us three siblings—Alice (the riveting Izabel Mar), David (the forlorn Luis Feliciano), and Linus (the quietly beastly Jonah O’Hara-David)—all sired by a man they both deify and despise, an architect of buildings and, inescapably, of their psychological prisons. Each child has a different mother, and each mother is—how shall we say this delicately?—extraordinary. One, a towering giantess; another, hirsute and wild; the third, a Janus-faced creature with a hidden visage at the back of her skull (think Malachi Throne’s intense portrayals of Falseface, the disfigured villain on the Batman TV series). Song's mothers belong less to the realm of realism than to that of archetype and nightmare—though in Duffy’s staging, they haunt only through the whispered residue in their children’s bodies and speech.
The narrative, such as it is, coils inward like a serpent consuming its own tail. These siblings do not so much progress through a story as they orbit the singularity of their shared grief and loathing, trapped in the architect-father's final creation: a home that breathes dread and exhales memory. There is talk—fleeting and fantastical—of escape, of conflagration, of undoing the structure. But the gravitational pull of inheritance, both genetic and architectural, is too strong. This is not a place one leaves; it is a place one absorbs into, or is absorbed by.
Duffy’s directorial choices are inspired in their queasy intimacy. This production, though staged in a cage, could very well be a zoo enclosure, as it forces the audience into a complicity as we watch the human animals pace and interact. Where the previous production had the audience peer around furniture, strain to locate voices, squirm as characters crawled beneath our chairs or vanish into unseen alcoves, this production keeps us at a safe distance where conversations in bare space leave absolutely nothing to the imagination. The tension is omnidirectional. One is constantly aware that though something is happening very much in the moment, that the story is larger and more terrible than we are permitted to see. It is a staging that weaponizes the limitations of space, turning real estate into emotional topography. Though we know how the actors entered at the top of the play, the “living” room becomes both stage and exitless sarcophagus.
The aesthetic choices surrounding the performers are equally unsettling. Director Alec Duffy’s scenic design is spare: an American flag is the wall-to-wall carpet and a microphone stand used at will. And that’s it. Kate McGee’s lighting renders their silhouettes jagged and puppetlike—each twitch, each contortion, another twitch of their generational curse. Steven Leffue’s sound design hums beneath everything like a dying appliance or an angry memory, while Dan Safer’s fight choreography is rendered all the more dangerous by the claustrophobia of proximity as they near the cage’s metal. When violence erupts—and it does—it feels less staged than sprung from the floorboards.
Naturally, Family arrives burdened with more than just its title—it drags behind it a freight train of inherited trauma, the kind of psychic inheritance that festers across generations like mold in the walls of an old house. As in so many tragic households, what is passed down here is not merely property or name but pain, pattern, pathology. This is a drama in which lineage is less a source of identity than a curse—a hereditary affliction that each child receives with the grim inevitability of DNA.
Song, with a playwright’s scalpel and a folklorist’s eye, constructs a world where every familial bond is also a noose. In one of the play’s most chillingly plainspoken moments, Alice poses a question that lands like a quiet thunderclap: “Why is Linus a terrible person?” She then answers herself, with the deadened logic of someone who has long since stopped believing in the possibility of alternatives: “Because his father was a terrible person.” It’s a blunt declaration that undercuts the play’s earlier whispers and half-truths, landing with the weight of myth. It is the tragedy of inheritance made literal. No redemption arc, no hand-wringing psychology—just one horror begetting another.
And yet, Song is far too sophisticated a dramatist to reduce the father’s legacy to a single monolith of evil. The paternal figure looms not in presence but in implication, his monstrousness rendered more potent by its ambiguity. Was Linus’s mother truly an astronaut, as the family legend claims? Or was that celestial narrative a child’s translation of something far darker—a memory of hands around a throat, masked in the language of escape? David’s mother, we are told, “fell down the stairs,” but Song’s refusal to offer exoneration through specificity demands we hear what is unsaid: a litany of abuse, normalized and rebranded as accident. The house may have been designed by an architect, but the foundation is built on lies and euphemism.
Alice’s own maternal history, by contrast, is delivered with such stark, unflinching clarity that it shocks the breath from the room. There is no metaphor here, no veil of ambiguity to soften the blow. Her mother’s fate is one of unambiguous violation: incest, rape, a conception born of brother and sister. It is a horror so grotesque that it shatters the semantic coherence of the word family itself. What remains after such revelation is not kinship but something more monstrous—a tangle of bodies and bloodlines from which no structure, emotional or architectural, can emerge unscathed…and this horror unfortunately will be repeated for them.
Each actor brings their own dark wattage, but Izabel Mar’s Alice is the lodestar here. Mar delivers a performance of uncanny texture: imperious one moment, broken the next, childlike, maternal, monstrous. She is the sibling most visibly marked by the grotesqueries of lineage—her body the site of transformation, her moods kaleidoscopic and terrible. Through her, the play’s mythic undercurrent breaks the surface; she is less a person than a living cipher of the family’s sorrow. Luis Feliciano’s David is the oldest and the most educated. Multi-lingual “to the nth power,” he gives the aura of a nerd shut-in, excessively learned with no outlet for the knowledge he has amassed. Very much bullied by his brother, and no doubt the object of his father’s disdain, he is the most pitiable of the three siblings. Beaten down and ridiculed, he still yearns for companionship; his pleas for his own half-sister to be his girlfriend are abhorrent. Jonah O’Hara-Davis’s Linus, the youngest of the three, a wanna-be screenwriter who can’t get past the descriptions of setting, might pass for a normal 20-year-old in another setting…if it weren’t for his abusive tendencies. O’Hara-Davis’ body language sets him apart from his siblings: he can easily slink close to the floor and cover space in an instant.
There is no joy in Family, nor should there be. It is a difficult, thorny piece, and even at its relatively brief runtime, it threatens to suffocate in its own metaphorical richness. But oh, what a strangulation. One leaves not entertained, exactly, but altered. In its previous incarnation, to sit within that home—to breathe its air, feel its temperature, watch its children devour one another—was to engage with something far more primal than narrative: a theatrical séance, a reckoning. Here, looking in through the cage, there’s not much difference than feeding time at the zoo…though real animals aren’t this starved for love and attention.
In the end, Family is less a play than a haunted structure. What Family leaves us with is not a portrait of dysfunction but its demolition. Song’s vision of generational damage is not cathartic but corruptive; not redemptive but recursive. This is not a family that heals, but one that metastasizes. The cycle continues, unbroken, unbreakable, with the children bearing both the bruises and the blueprints of their parents’ sins.
The play does not ask for your applause; it asks for your attention, your discomfort, and your willingness to sit, very still, observing where something awful has happened—and has happened yet again.
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Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on September 22, 2025. All rights reserved.