NEW YORK, NY.- A bare stage is like a blank canvas; it’s all potential until the artists begin to shape their work. Life can follow a similar logic, in that every move is a foreclosure of possibility, narrowing both the focus and the way forward.

Ella (Aya Cash), the drifting millennial daughter in “The Best We Could (a family tragedy),” which opened at New York City Center on Wednesday, has cycled in and out of enough careers (modern dance, a museum gift shop) that she’s written a children’s book about giving up on your dreams. (She also teaches chair yoga.)

We learn all this from a narrator called Maps (Maureen Sebastian), who welcomes the audience to the Manhattan Theater Club production, introduces each character in bitingly specific detail and dictates plot and dialogue before it happens.

It’s an apt mode of giving directions, as the play’s nominal throughline is a cross-country road trip that Ella takes with her father, Lou (Frank Wood), to pick up a rescue dog. At the time of their drive, Ella has just broken up with her girlfriend, while Lou, who is nearing retirement age, is angling for a research job. On the way, they visit Lou’s closest friend and former colleague Marc (Brian D. Coats), and Lou appeals to him for help in landing the gig. His wife, Peg (Constance Shulman), chimes in through phone calls to Ella and Lou and appears in revelatory flashbacks.

The actors are impeccably cast and deliver unaffected and subtly astonishing performances. Their characters form a kind of Ur-family, their dynamics both convincingly particular and broadly representative of relationships connecting husbands, wives and generations.




The playwright, Emily Feldman, achieves a captivating depth of field beyond her characters’ surface actions, and even their mordant, often bleak powers of observation. (Tragedy seems like a misnomer through most of the show’s 90 minutes, which are shot through with easy but deceptively dark humor.) Cosmic questions that lurk beneath everyday routines seem to creep in from the periphery of director Daniel Aukin’s minimal but imaginative staging — the loudest being, is this really all there is to life?

There is more to Feldman’s layered investigation of consumer capitalism, kinship and gendered power imbalances, which she brings to light throughout “The Best We Could” in the manner of family secrets: There’s no escaping the ones you love, or the truth. Though it also may be no surprise to learn that like the sort of men he represents, Lou is in a crisis of his own making.

For Ella, aimlessness itself is a kind of privilege. As her father points out, there’s a reason she was able to take ballet lessons, buy whatever she wanted from the mall and drive her own car. If there’s an element of myopia to Feldman’s otherwise searingly insightful play, it’s the cultural specificity of someone with the luxury of blowing in the breeze, trying out this or that, with a safety net to catch them when they fall.

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‘The Best We Could (a family tragedy)’

Through March 26 at the New York City Center, Stage I; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour and 30 minutes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.