Review Roundup: SAFE HOUSE Opens Off-Broadway at Theatre Row

split/decision is presenting the World Premiere of Safe House by L.B. Browne, directed by Benjamin Viertel at Theatre Row.

Safe House is a family drama set in the days leading up to a U.S. presidential election. Convinced the second American civil war is imminent, Rock, a father secretly dying of a hereditary neurodegenerative disease, becomes consumed by the need to protect his family. In the basement of his Pennsylvania suburban home, transformed, beam by beam, into a doomsday bunker, he has built what he believes is the last safe place on earth.

But when his estranged teenage daughter returns home pregnant, the tensions that have long simmered beneath the surface of the household break open, and the father’s obsession with safety turns into something else entirely. What follows is a reckoning with fear, and the consequences of confusing love with control. See what the critics are saying…

Ross, Front Mezz Junkies: What makes Safe House most compelling is the distinction it draws between protection and control. Rock believes he is protecting his family from a dangerous world, but every measure he takes to secure that protection gives him more control over the people inside. His fear has become architecture. His politics, his illness, his relationship with his father, and his determination to keep danger outside all feed the same impulse to build walls and decide who gets to move within them. The play does not offer an easy answer for what fear does to a family when it becomes wrapped up in love, loyalty, history, and the need to keep everyone safe.

Mack Muldofsky, Stage Buddy: And Safe House works well as a drama about the excesses of reactionary politics. But L.B. Browne’s play also functions on a deeper, more nuanced, invisible realm: that of the unspoken, decades-long grievances, compromises and resentments that undergird nuclear families, and how, when those long-held feelings erupt into physical violence, they can seem both incredibly shocking and completely inevitable. No one can hurt you like your loved ones, and that’s true whether you’re living eight feet underground or not.

Jon Sobel, Blogcritics: Marc Kudisch delivers a heartbreaking spitfire of a performance as Rock, a right-wing conspiracy theorist convinced an imminent presidential election will bring about a second civil war. The always wonderful Karen Ziemba is his enabling wife Slipper (Rock and Slipper – what telling names!), an exemplar of that familiar kind of creature who goes along with others’ increasingly outrageous behavior to keep her (usually her) family together.

Suzanna Bowling, Times Square Chronicles: Viertel’s direction, however, compounds the play’s problems rather than clarifying them. This is a small theatre, yet the production does not consistently reach the back of the room. More importantly, the staging needs to help us navigate Browne’s many competing ideas, distinguishing the essential from the incidental. Instead, too much arrives with equal dramatic importance, leaving the audience to sort through an already overcrowded narrative.

Average Rating: 70.0%