The family that plays together doesn’t always stay together, particularly when Manning’s Annie wakes up one day and says that Tommy raped her after coming home from an unconsummated date with Cassie. Did he do it out of incestuous infatuation? Did she invent the attack from a sense of her closeness to her brother? Did the dissolute dad, who’s departed the scene, commit incest? Did somebody else do it?
This material seems a long way off from Lopez’s breakthrough, the Cuban-flavored Sonia Flew, which debuted at the Huntington Theatre Company and has had successful productions elsewhere (including the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, which staged a workshop production of Gary). Gary does not deal with ethnicity, though what binds it and Sonia is Lopez’s ability to dissect dysfunction with equal amounts of compassion and toughness. Do we love this people or hate them? Lopez gives everyone enough body that it’s hard to say. (Cassie, however, could use more work. Her philosophical diatribes seem forced.)
Rick Sims’s music nicely captures the post-punk scene — angry, hard-driving, one-dimensional. Much of the music is very good; very little is memorable.
If The Clean House is a triumph of mostly established Boston artists, Gary shows that the next generation has promise as well. Director M. Bevin O’Gara — an artistic associate at the New Rep, as it happens — matches the tightness of Lopez’s script with strong pacing and a sure hand with the young cast. They’re all keepers, as far as the local theater scene is concerned, but the standout is Nacer. Like many a rock star, he makes charisma dangerous, and like many a good actor, he makes transitions from saint to sinner and back again plausible and not always contradictory.
As with The Clean House, it takes a fine playwright to make such talent obvious. This could be Lifetime movie material, but Lopez makes Gary rock.
