Power couple Benjamin Braxton and Mira Blair see their picture-perfect life at an isolated Hudson Valley retreat go gloriously off script—taking their friends, flings, and teenage daughter along for the ride.

I think this has such an interesting surreal tone but it doesn’t really come together because (mild spoilers)

1. The writing for some characters is clunky to a degree that I dreaded them appearing on stage (esp. the teenage daughter, but also the woman who rattles off Virgil and Shakespeare quotes on a dime and is an expert on butterfly biology and slips in and out of a British accent apparently just for fun). Other characters speak in one-liners and tropes which can be funny if a bit grating after awhile
2. The way this resolves feels clumsy. Why does the daughter want to assemble these five people in this room to talk about her conservancy? Why do they go, considering many of their relationships are strictly professional and the personal ones have all had fallings-out? It feels like the relationships don’t actually matter. Things are just happening. The final point is just that Hamish Linklater is a bad man
3. While I generally liked the set and the lighting was satisfactory in a vacuum with some neat flourishes synchronized to music, it feels like a directorial oversight to combine so many bright spotlights with a visibly wobbly “glass” door parallel to the audience center-stage that the characters are constantly opening and closing - it creates an irritatingly reflective/almost blinding focal point for the entire runtime