The sneaky brilliance of “Problems Between Sisters” is that it doesn’t simply ask, “What if the brothers were sisters?” but rather the more complex question: “What if the sisters gave themselves permission to act as men do?” More precisely, what if women ceded control to their inner art monsters? The question has special resonance for Jess, who has toiled for 20 years to get that solo show.
Rory has a leg up on Jess in the chutzpah department and, as in “True West,” much of her badassery rubs off on her starchy sister over the course of the play’s fleet 100 minutes. A keyboard gets smashed, tables and chairs are overturned, food is spilled, weed is smoked and verbal hand grenades are hurled.
At the 11th hour, their aunt (the priceless Nancy Robinette, who played the mother in Arena Stage’s production of “True West” 20 years ago) shows up as a nonplused interloper in her own trashed house. Her all-too-brief, off-kilter asides — about, say, a woman’s decapitated head “lolling on the side of the road” or a cleaning solution that involves “the firstborn kitten of a three-legged cat” whisked with other ingredients — are among the show’s highlights. The two videos that the sisters create also inject a note of surreality into the play and recall Jonas’s 2022 play “Your Own Personal Exegesis,” about members of a church youth group.
Shepard once described “True West” as a play of “double nature”; the brothers, starting off as opposites, trade places. One production, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly, played with the notion of identity by having the actors switch roles on alternate nights.
It’s more difficult to imagine that happening with the “Problems” actors, who only occasionally deliver the gamma ray intensity that their roles call for. And while Jonas’s script amply accommodates the notion of the sisters as Jungian shadows of each other, neither Fox nor Janssen leaps with both feet into their alter egos. As a result, the play never edges toward a Shepardian conflagration of the American berserk. It ends in a standoff, with art monster facing art monster, neither giving way.
Problems Between Sisters
Through June 16 at the Studio Theater, Washington, D.C.; studiotheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
