Cult of Love – 05 January 2025

Holidays, touted as times of tradition, inclusion, warmth, and family, seem in real life to be somewhat of an enigma for everyone, as many also tout the holidays as times of stress, rejection, loneliness, and deciding who you really consider family. Cult of Love was an intense struggle for most of the characters between nostalgia for a time when everyone loved each other and the painful reality of not loving who everyone has become. Complicated by spouses and lifestyle changes, the four Dahl children, Mark (Zachary Quinto), Evie (Rebecca Henderson), Johnny (Christopher Sears), and Diana (Shailene Woodley), all seem to hold making music in perfect harmony, eating lamb and figgy pudding, and reminding each other of happy stories from the past, as their foundation for what a “happy” holiday means [clearly heavily influenced by the interests of their parents, Virginia (Mare Winningham) and William (David Rasche)].

From the beginning, the characters seem split along several divisive minefields, which later explode among the four children and the different lives they now lead. Introduced early on, some of the children are worried about their father’s mental health, while others believe it shouldn’t be spoken about. Some believe strongly in the religious aspects of a holiday and a holy life, while others are averse to religious teachings, mostly due to feelings of exclusion. Some are accepting of addiction as a part of life, while others are disparaging towards those trying to make a change toward sobriety. Some are parents/expectant parents while others are unable to have children or are not desiring the inclusion of children in their current lives. There is a recently married lesbian couple in the room, and some are so averse to that conceptually that they did not show up to the wedding. There are characters who find it easy to forgive hurtful statements made by others with mental health challenges, while some internalize those statements and don’t let them go. Some believe in medication as a necessary part of mental health treatment, while others cleave to religion as the only necessary answer.

In a single act, Cult of Love displays the biggest disparity of beliefs and issues that a family can hold and still try to call themselves a “family.” Alliances are formed and discarded when they outlive their usefulness. The glue that holds together these ideas comes from characters who don’t know what they’re entering into and are able to change the topic of conversation right before the pressure cooker would have exploded. The experiencing of watching the play has the hilarious ring of truth because everybody can relate to some part of it. What’s fun, is that it’s not a play that simplifies a family gathering into an us-and-them story about a particular black sheep. Every Dahl child is an outcast in some way and the favorite in another. They all have connections to each other and judgments about each other. Everyone’s life is on the table for both praise and criticism. To Mark, Evie, Johnny, and Diana, this is what defines a “normal” holiday. And based on the placement of audience laughter, I think there was resounding agreement in the room.

It was the spouses/partners/guests who found the holiday the hardest to get through even though they were frequently not the primary topic of criticism. It was sad to watch the interactions of a family that loved each other (more or less) cause pain and turmoil to the family members that had been chosen by the nuclear family to love and to have and to hold and to protect. Each Dahl child needed a particular brand of healing from the damages of their family of origin. Mark chose Rachel (Molly Bernard)—someone with a good head for business, logistics, reality, and how the nonreligious community perceives truth. Evie chose Pippa (Roberta Colindrez), a more rebellious, more masculine-presenting lesbian who can be quiet and unassuming when hurt, but does eventually find the words and the courage to say what she is feeling. Johnny chose sobriety, exemplified in bringing Loren (Barbie Ferreira) his sponsee, rather than a partner. He is in the process of choosing himself, but surrounding himself with people like Loren who help him separate the toxicity of his past from the life he wants to live going forward. Diana chose James (Christopher Lowell) because she needed to be affirmed unconditionally, and found someone who saw her pain as part of something beautiful that didn’t need fixing.

What of the incredibly mild mannered parents, William and Virginia? How did all of these wonderful, terrible things evolve in their household and lead to such drastically different needs and outcomes for their children? Though not explicitly stated, I might hazard a guess at raising their children with a one-size-fits-all model that didn’t account for individual differences in how people need to be loved and supported. Each successive child taught them something that the previous child didn’t have, and then the severity of the youngest’s mental health challenges took everyone else’s needs and deprioritized them in ways that were hurtful. Mark, previously praised for piety, abandoned it. Evie came out of the closest at a time when keeping Diana in check overshadowed Evie’s identity. Johnny? Alcohol and narcotics so that he could remain the life of the party.

We all found ourselves somewhere in this family drama. We all lost ourselves somewhere in this family drama. It really did feel like a cult—because, even at the end where everyone was hurt, nobody was comfortable leaving the fold. The final question I was left with was, “is this love?” It resembled many of our familial stories. So really, my revised question is, “do we know what love is?” With a follow-up: who is supposed to be telling us?

I did not attend this performance on a press pass.