Weddings, anniversaries, holidays: The family get-together is a dramatic gift that keeps on giving to both screen and stage. Crystal Finn’s new play, “Find Me Here,” at Wild Project, falls into a subcategory of the funerals subgenre — the opening of a will. In this case, a patriarch’s last wishes are discovered by his three daughters and their families. Truths and conflicts emerge gingerly, almost tentatively, because Finn is less interested in confrontation than in gentle poking and prodding.
Unfortunately, “Find Me Here,” the third and final installment of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks 2024, is also unwilling to commit to any particular point. Its cast, however, including Constance Shulman, Miriam Silverman and Frank Wood, is so good that the production feels like the theater equivalent of handing Formula 1 drivers keys to an economy sedan. The actors are experts, but there is only so much the vehicle can do.
The story revolves around the siblings Nancy (Lizbeth Mackay), Dee-Dee (Shulman) and Deborah (Kathleen Tolan), whose ages range from the mid-60s to the early 70s. Deborah is the oldest and has spent the past 30 years on an island, having followed a guru there. Tolan gives her the beatific mien of someone who can see a light invisible to others, which contrasts nicely with the acerbic Dee-Dee and the stressed-out Nancy.
The will’s most consequential revelation is that Deborah was left nothing, an outcome she shrugs off. When Nancy tells Deborah that their father did love her, Dee-Dee says, “Well that’s … we just don’t know … he did, Deborah.”
Mind you, Nancy also calls their father a tyrant and says that when she informed him that she was getting divorced, he replied, “Three daughters, and not one of them a success.”
Though there are three sisters in the play, Finn (who was in the cast of “Usus,” the first installment of Summerworks 2024) doesn’t nod toward Chekhov so much as to some kind of American portraiture painted in small, innocuous brushstrokes.
The problem is that they don’t cohere, and mostly float about vaguely. This is echoed in the scenic design by the Dots collective. Its semicircle of wooden seats and cushioned bay window do not suggest a lake house, which is where we are meant to be; for a good long while, I thought the characters were meeting in either some kind of spiritual-adjacent venue or the most woo-woo lawyer’s office ever.
And yet Caitlin Sullivan’s production is eminently watchable because the wonderful actors keep finding — or maybe creating — nuances. Shulman, for example, can extract a laugh from lines that would be banal in a less idiosyncratic performer’s mouth. Unexpected readings abound, keeping us engaged, even if some do not so much illuminate the playwright’s intent as make you question it.
Even a silent reaction can become a mini-drama. At one point, Nancy confesses that she is still in love with her ex-husband, Leo (Wood), oblivious to the fact that her current boyfriend, Mike (Keith Reddin), is right behind her. Quiet upset registers fleetingly on Mike’s face, like a cloud briefly dimming the sun, and the couple’s dynamic switches from warmly supportive to a little heart-wrenching.
The family’s adult children are woefully underwritten but become compelling characters thanks to Kyle Beltran and Shannon Tyo as Dee-Dee’s son and daughter-in-law, and especially Silverman (a Tony Award winner for her performance last year in “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window”), who brings an intriguing, hesitant malaise to Nancy’s daughter. These actor-driven moments of grace are quintessentially alive, and are what turn the play into theater.
Find Me Here
Through June 29 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; clubbedthumb.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.
