A TV season’s worth of secrets and lies come to light over the course of one tumultuous weekend in John Bunzel’s darkly comedic, ever so slightly absurdist Boxing Lessons, an expertly acted, directed, and designed New American Theatre World Premiere.

World renowned children’s novelist Paul Green’s dead body has been fished out of the waters surrounding Washington State’s San Juan Islands, prompting the arrival of his adult offspring Ned (Luke McClure) and Judy (Eve Danzeisen) to box up decades of their father’s accumulated books, papers, and assorted paraphernalia while attempting to figure out what made the bestselling author of Suck My Thumb (“one of the most acclaimed children’s books ever”) tick.

Before long the squabbling siblings (he a tenured history professor at an Iowa university, she the single mother of a teenager with gender confusion) find themselves joined by their estranged mother Meg (Susan Wilder as Paul’s long-divorced Mommie Dearest of a wife) and their autistic, about-to-turn-thirty adopted brother Steve (Stephen Tyler Howell) along with folksy local Sheriff Bob (Eric Curtis Johnson) and their dad’s crusty longtime fishing buddy Billy (Bruce Nozick) in a search for Paul’s will and a possible suicide note to explain his watery demise.

Let the onion peeling begin.

Playwright Bunzel has filled Boxing Lessons with characters so quirky, they might have been written for a Coen Brothers-style indie flick or an “It’s not TV, it’s HBO” series, and anyone who can imagine a “beloved Christmas classic” entitled Suck My Thumb (“I never looked at Santa Claus quite the same way again,” recalls a nostalgic Sheriff Bob) is about as far from mainstream as a writer can get, all of which adds up to eighty or so minutes of family dysfunction at its weirdest and wildest, directed by Jack Stehlin with razor-sharp precision and performed by six of the best (and best-cast) actors in town.

Boxing Lessons looks absolutely terrific on John Iacovelli’s majorly cluttered rustic cabin set (kudos shared with propmaster David Saewert), vividly lit by Josephine Wang as are Florence Kember Bunzel’s character-perfect costumes, and with sound designer Christopher Moscatiello linking scenes with eclectic, appropriately quirky musical underscoring, you’ve got L.A. intimate theater production design at its finest.

Boxing Lesson is produced by Jeannine Wisnosky Stehlin. Casting is by Victoria Hoffman. Derek R. Copenhaver is production stage manager.

Whether you leave Boxing Lessons with memories of your family’s own dysfunction or grateful to have dodged the dysfunctional family bullet, the Green family cabin is one well worth visiting. Just be glad you don’t have to move in.

The New American Theatre, 1312 N. Wilton Place, Hollywood.
www.newamericantheatre.com

–Steven Stanley
May 3, 2019
Photos: Jeannine Wisnosky Stehlin

Tags: John Bunzel, Los Angeles Theater Review, The New American Theatre