Family Feuds

When playwright Frank D. Gilroy made his Broadway debut in 1964 with The Subject Was Roses, winning the Tony, Pulitzer and New York Drama Critics Circle awards for best play, he seemed to be starting a glittering career. But he has never come close to that glory since. Presumably that is why he has returned to the Roses characters in Any Given Day, his first play in 14 years to reach Broadway. The new work is worthy enough, with more characters and a richer plot than Roses, and is handsomely mounted and capably performed by a cast including Sada Thompson in her first Broadway appearance since 1972.

Alas, the competent production only underscores the root of Gilroy’s problem: he is writing a no-longer-fashionable form, family melodrama, and is unable — as indeed, he was unable even in Roses, for all its acute observation — to invest middle-class conflict with enough poetry or subtext to have it mean more than the surface struggle. This kind of storytelling is now done by TV movies of the week.

Any Given Day takes place a few years before Roses. The central characters were offstage presences in that play: a manipulative matriarch (Thompson in peak form) and her mentally and physically handicapped grandson. The new work also concerns itself with two marriages, one contemplated and one in danger of breaking up, plus tuberculosis, a son’s going off to World War II, and the matriarch’s claims to foretell the future.

The prevailing mood is wistful. The Roses family, now secondary characters, uninterestingly prefigure what will happen to them. Indeed, only one supporting actor, Andrew Robinson, as a good but geeky prospective in-law, gets below the surface. The whole experience elicits respect for the author and compassion for his people, but not much pleasure.