Family heartbreak explored

In the world of categories, “Family Drama” looms large — big in numbers, certainly, and also way up there in ambiguity and square mileage. Playwrights are free to roam freely and graze at will.   

Cate Ryan corners a thorny territory in her new play “In The Secret Sea” at the Beckett Theatre on Theatre Row. She offers us a compact rendition of a family heartbreak, one that crisscrosses from the elders to the young and back again. A lot is going on. If you think “beneath the surface” as you ponder the title of the play, you are getting the picture.

There’s a pun in the title as well, and it fits, since the moral challenge that confronts the characters is based upon the dread burdens of being in the secret… see?

The waters are vast and deep along the way. Fate comes to call. 

“In The Secret Sea” invokes an issue that has bedeviled our society for a generation or more. Cate Ryan puts a face on it. 

There is no easy choice here. Ryan’s characters struggle with themselves and each other, and the play becomes a heavyweight bout for this family, along a quirky and difficult passage we would not wish upon anyone.

Your own perspectives might give “In The Secret Sea” an extra shimmer. The moral terrain here is rough going — a challenge.

But Ryan knows how to mix a cocktail. We might think we are on familiar ground. There is the Connecticut living room, tastefully done. A married couple squabbles. The dreaded in-laws drop by. A secret dogs the principals, across a generational divide. Jokes mask pain. God is invoked. A clock is ticking. All this without an intermission, very up-to-date.  But there’s nothing simple going on. Ryan uses the customary elements to make her tale all that more immediate. 

The production benefits from a dazzling pedigree. And everything looks great — correct, in fact. We are in good hands. Thank the costumes of Suzy Benzinger, lighting of Ken Billington, scenery of Beowulf Borritt and Alexis Distler and the work of director Martin Charnin. And how cool to have Mr. Charnin helm this new American play on Theatre Row. Giants are walking on West 42nd Street! The four elders of the cast (Paul Carlin, Glynnis O’Connor [no relation], Malachy Cleary, and Shelly Burch) brim with the gusto these turbulent rites require. But it is the younger generation with more at stake, and Adam Petherbridge sculpts a haunting portrait as a young man facing hard choices. He carries the fire memorably.

A tribal urgency paces the action here, in a sparkling production at the Samuel Beckett on Theatre Row. “In The Secret Sea” runs until May 21.