'Grandpa Davide (Paul Dillon) is an Auschwitz survivor in the late stages of ALS, while Paola rode out the war in the relative safety of a convent in Zagreb after fleeing Italy as an orphan.' | kerryreid
, Lyonne reflects on her heritage as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, and how that trauma creates ripple effects through the generations. “I joke that there’s a straight line from Hitler to heroin,” she says., now in its world premiere at Victory Gardens under Devon de Mayo’s direction, isn’t shooting up, but they’re primed for generational pain.
A lot comes flooding out at that dinner, including the fear of growing anti-Semitism in the U.S. in the wake of the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh only months earlier. The conflict between Dev and Yael takes root in the familiar soil of who bears the greater responsibility for taking care of elders, as well as Dev’s own insecurity as to how much she really is tied to the family’s history. Yael is collecting her grandparents’ stories, while Dev is tending to their physical needs.
It would all be meaty enough for one meal. But Viterbi spreads it out over four different seders, spanning centuries. In the second act, we meet the family again in various configurations. First, Roman and Dillon reappear as younger versions of Paola and Davide, enjoying their first seder in the United States in 1954, where Davide tells a different story about an incident in Auschwitz than the one we heard in the first act.
In 2050, middle-aged Yael and Dev have reunited after a period of estrangement. Paola and Davide are long dead, of course, and now Valeria is in a wheelchair, unable to speak . It’s the first seder the family has had after another period of anti-Semitic repression—one that cost Valeria her university job, and one that is all too imaginable in the current climate.
The last scene feels oddly superfluous and anticlimactic, undercutting the tensions that de Mayo and Viterbi build so carefully in the near-dystopian future of 2050. We’ve grown to understand these characters over the first three scenes so well that this coda feels unnecessary and self-conscious, reducing them at times almost to caricatures. Still, Viterbi’s dialogue, de Mayo’s staging, and the rich performances offer us plenty to consider about survival, fear, and love.
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