"This family has sure got a lot on its plate," remarked our companion at the intermission of the new play Wake, from Onward Ho! Productions. Playwright Sonya Schneider loads the Harlows with about a decade's worth of mishap and miscommunication, and then packs them all into a tiny cabin for a birthday party. There's a point about fifteen minutes in where you feel acute sympathy for Delby, a friend who's blindly wandered into this O'Neill-meets-Stoppard family drama (runs through April 13, Thursday to Sunday, at the Little Theatre, tickets $15).

This is the latest collaboration between Schneider and director Laurel Pilar Garcia; the two wrote and directed Intiman Theatre’s 35th Anniversary Gala production in 2007. (Jennifer Zeyl has outdone herself with the set design. We were about ready to ask for the rental rate on the woodsy cabin she's built in the Little Theatre; it seems to have a great view out the back.)

We say O'Neill-meets-Stoppard because of the messiness of the family dynamic, and because Schneider has gifted her characters with a frightening facility for esoteric non sequiturs. You spend a good deal of time trying to decode gaps in understanding: Why is this person behaving this way? Why now?

Simple, salt-of-the-earth father Joe Harlow (Andrew Zavada) proffers homespun truths like, "The past is incomplete." Delby, a friend of Joe's son Tom, rattles on about the neuroscience of memory and Aristotle's theory of virtuous behavior. Tom's sister Claire, an anorexic, brainiac, workaholic still not "dealing" with 9/11, badgers and insults everyone within earshot. Mom Harlow, Helen, wanders about in a robe, too tired to say much, but her sister Miriam, a chirpy Midwestern-sunshine type, will suddenly deliver a monologue on pogroms. Tom wants to be a veterinarian, but worries he may be too stupid.

Besides Schneider's over-stated concern with the unreliability of memory (her program notes quote someone saying, poetically: "Every act of remembering is an act of creation"), she tries to conjure up drama from citation. In the way a Godard film can be more about his experience of film than its supposed subject, Wake (whether it means to or not) turns out to be memorable more for its blizzard of reconstituted intellectual epiphanies than for the lives of the people we see onstage.

The cast had not completely gelled by the second night, when we saw it. Too many cast members were running lines rather than speaking them; their conversations had a brisk, back-and-forth rhythm at odds with people struggling to deal with unpalatable truths. We liked the drama inherent in their cramped quarters, but the actors seemed to pull back from real anger in such tight spots. That said, Kate Godman as Helen Harlow and Chelsey Rives as her sister Miriam both gave strong, three-dimensional performances.

Photo: (from left) Nik Doner (Tom Harlow), Chelsey Rives (Miriam Friedman), Derek Schreck (Max Harlow) and Andrew Zavada (Joe Harlow); Chris Bennion
© 2008.