As a young man, the playwright Richard Greenberg aspired to be an architect. His fascination with the built environment endured until his death in July, at the age of 67. The neurotic families who populate his dramas are shaped by the design of their homes; Greenberg often gives the impression of having constructed an imaginary house at the centre of a drama, before creating the characters to live in it.
Not all Greenberg’s plays are concerned with domestic architecture: he won his 2003 Tony award for Take Me Out, which imagined the fallout should an active Major League Baseball player come out of the closet. (As of 2025, no real-life MLB player has ever done so before retirement.) Yet Greenberg returned, again and again, to houses as sites in which parents encode their dreams and from which uncomprehending children struggle to escape.
In Three Days of Rain, the children of two star architectural partners quarrel about who should inherit their parents’ most famous building, a Long Island mansion featured in Life magazine. A second-act flashback shows us that they have completely misunderstood their parents’ emotional needs and working relationship.
At the end of The American Plan, Nick visits the Manhattan townhouse of Lili, an heiress he failed to marry during a holiday romance ten years earlier. Nick remembers how she once described her controlling mother’s oppressive decor, “all dark damask and sabbath light”. On finally seeing the place for the first time, he tells Lili she’d described her late mother’s taste perfectly—but wouldn’t she like to renovate? Lili is confused. She had already renovated according to her own taste. It never occurred to her that it still reflected her mother’s.
Greenberg’s canvas was upper-middle-class Manhattan, often depicting Jewish families. Producers have sometimes hesitated to transfer such culturally specific work to London, but now, British audiences have the opportunity to see vintage Greenberg. The Assembled Parties made its UK premiere at the Hampstead Theatre in a characteristically clean, understated and intelligent production by the director Blanche McIntyre.
Again, this is a play about a family defined by its home. We start in 1980 with Julie—who had youthful success as a movie starlet and is now the trophy wife of businessman Ben—opening their 14-room Manhattan apartment to his family for a secular Jewish Christmas. Julie is played by American big-hitter Jennifer Westfeldt, but the play revolves around her relationship with Ben’s brash, demanding and surprisingly caring sister Faye, played with typical panache by Tracy-Ann Oberman. By the second act, set in late 2000, both sisters-in-law face broken relationships with their adult children.
Its makers approached this production like they would a Chekhov drama
As Julie ages, her home becomes more visible in its decayed grandeur. As McIntyre points out to me when we exchange emails, Greenberg’s script calls for the first act to move “swiftly among suggestions of rooms”; the second to be a “detailed box set, inert”. James Cotterill’s set executes this request exactly. When we first meet Julie in her role of chatelaine, we see elegant outlines of her different living spaces: an ornately set dining table; a teenager’s compact bedroom and debris; a central Christmas tree divided from them by channels of darkness. Returning from the interval we find ourselves back in the same apartment, but now it is all hardwood surfaces and cracking doorways.
Both McIntyre and Oberman tell me of approaching this production like Chekhov. McIntyre writes of “the same intentional opaqueness… when characters have knowledge that they don’t share with the audience, because that would be out of character”. When we eavesdrop on these two family Christmases, 20 years apart, we can’t help but be frustrated by how much we don’t hear, because no one is telling the full story to their in-laws. Who does?
Fortunately, we share an observational viewpoint with Jeff, an awkward friend of Julie’s son and escapee from a poorer, Orthodox Jewish family. (Played by Sam Marks, growing into the role as time passes.) Like us, he is a bemused outsider, forced in one delicious scene into sneaking secret telephone updates to his mother, who is clearly torn between envy and religious disapproval of Julie’s lifestyle. It’s not the only side-splitting telephone set-piece: towards the end, Faye lands like a tornado on her estranged daughter’s answerphone. As ever, when Oberman is on stage or screen, you can’t take your eyes off her.
For Oberman, Greenberg’s value lies in his humanity: “He never condemns, he never judges, and I love him for that.” For all the tart remarks exchanged between relatives, The Assembled Parties has surprising heart. McIntyre’s production gives the final plot beats an unequivocal feeling of hope; it is the only aspect of The Assembled Parties which feels like a departure from classic Greenberg—he is rarely this uplifting. In times even more troubled than the play’s settings, it feels like a welcome relief.
