REVIEW:  L.A. WEEKLY, Nov. 17, 1989

"Daddy Dearest"
by Steven Mikulan

Like smoke wafting from a burning empire, the scent of decaying family life commands modern playwrights' imaginatoins. From Eugene O'Neill on, American writers have dissected the psychoses that cause the nuclear family to split apart with destructive energy, often finding parallels to our national political culture. Two productions currently playing on L.A. boards focus on the decline of the American family — and the body politic — although they view their characters' conditions from radically different perspectives...

George F. Walker may be a Canadian, but his reading of life south of the border is terrifyingly sharp, Better Living begins with Nora, a widow with three adult daughters, digging in the basement to expand the family home. She's fast-talking in that annoying, schizophrenic way that usually marks sitcoms. Soon, however, we realize that Nora's situation, while funny, is not so familiar. It seems that 10 years ago her cop-husband, Tom, took a powder after burning all the family's clothing. That painful memory — and the knowledge that Nora and her priest-brother Jack tried to kill Tom — has just about scarred over when in walks the husband. Well, not exactly Tom, but rather a similar-looking ex-drinking chum from Tom's years on the road who figures he can impersonate the wandering breadwinner.

While the Tom manque is initially accepted by the real father's daughters, Nora spots the cheat and eventually he admits his impersonation. But he doesn't leave. Instead, he turns the messy, emotionally chaotic household into an efficiently run work camp. His aim is to fortify the exterior of Nora's home with razor wire as she continues her subterranean expansion — all the while stocking up on canned foodstuffs. The new Tom is convinced that apocalypse is 'round the corner in the form of "secret armies of confiscation" — bands of Third World invaders eager to pillage America. "I am the soldier of the total-shit future," he claims, adding that his plan for Nora's family is "a kind of socialism based on the reality of the place."

The acquiescence of Nora's family to Tom's benign authoritarianism tells us as much about the collaborationist instincts of American political life as did the complicity of the Lomans to Willy's dementia. Nora tolerates it because Tom is a man who gets things done and whom she finds attractive in a deja-vu way. Seventeen-year-old daughter Gail was too young when her father left to really remember him, and at first welcomes the substitute Tom. Mary Ann, the confused middle daughter, seems to go along with the new order because it spells an end to her own emotional turmoil, while lawyer-daughter Elizabeth, at first fiercely defiant, in time recognizes in herself some of the same domineering qualities that define Tom. In all these cases the characters allow misplaced hopes for order and prosperity to paralyze their efforts to lead independent lives. Only Jack, the former man of faith who now believes in nothing, is unmoved by Tom, and it rests upon his shoulders to overthrow the usurper.

In a way, Tom is Willy Loman by other means. Willy constantly babbles about the nurturing past; Tom speaks of a hellish future. Willy subjugates his wife, Linda, by his abruptness; Tom neutralizes Nora through his protective ness. Willy trusts ihe world; Tom is paranoid. Willy is the father who has never really been home for his family; Tom is the dad who never goes away. Despite these differences, when measured against their aims, Willy and Tom arc really flip sides of the same coin; what matters most is their common goal of asserting patriarchal authority over their respective families and that sacred American institution, the Paid-for House.

Better Living, more so than Salesman, defines contemporary America's split self-image, one nominally formed by idealism but more completely defined by compromise and expediency, a political portrait lineated by equivocations and constantly shifting allegiances. Its implications of frightening instability are made all the sharper through Peggy Shannon's careful direction of a fine cast, particularly Arlen Dean Snyder as Tom and Jane Kaczmarek as his nemesis, Elizabeth. Snyder makes his character an amiable, slack-jawed talker who just happens to be capable of remodeling a white middle-class home along the lines of China's corrective May 7 schools. Kaczmareck, for her part, is stunning as the aggressive, almost mannish Elizabeth, whose first instinct is to kill her revenant father the moment he walks in the door. In her scenes with Snyder, the tension is Elektra-fying.