In Cult of Love, the new play from Leslye Headland, four now-grown, semi-estranged siblings return to their childhood home for Christmas, and are confronted by a possibly ailing father, as well as various interpersonal disappointments and conflicts. That is all to say that yes, the set-up recalls Wes Anderson’s Christmas-adjacent classic The Royal Tenenbaums, and that’s even before one character practically quotes Anderson’s movie, petulantly asking the Dahl family matriarch “Why is she allowed to do that?” when learning that one sibling, along with her husband and baby, will be staying at the parents’ cozily lit, seemingly well-appointed Westchester home indefinitely. (Margot Tenenbaum demanded to know the same thing when Chas returned home with his young sons.)
But by the end of this one-act dramedy, Headland’s first Broadway production, comparisons to the superficially similar earlier film fall away with a decidedly different ratio of bitter to sweet. Cult of Love is different, too, from the movies Headland herself has written and directed: the caustically funny Bachelorette (adapted from her own play), and the gentler but no less hilarious rom-com Sleeping with Other People; this one has less banter and fewer zingers by design (though plenty of laughs remain). Oddly and interestingly, the play, first performed in 2018, shares more common ground with The Acolyte, Headland’s conspicuously underrated Star Wars TV series that sent certain fans into paroxysms of discomfort earlier this year before Disney acquiesced with a cancellation. That YA-skewing space fantasy addressed competing belief systems and the sometimes-thin line between loyalty and fanaticism. The characters in Cult of Love face a similar conflict, where a family can be as variously binding, toxic, loving and difficult to escape as any religion. Or cult.
