Though it’s perfectly entertaining, with crowd-pleasing performances from Tracy-Ann Oberman and New York theatre stalwart Jennifer Westfeldt, I can’t quite see the relevance Richard Greenberg’s American play has to London today. It’s a serio-comic snapshot of a middle-class Jewish family celebrating Christmas in a palatial, rent-controlled, upper West Side apartment in 1980: and then again, much reduced and depleted, in 2000.
It’s not about Aids, which claims one character, and it’s only tangentially about the golden era of cheap Manhattan living. It's not really about the horror these lifelong Democrats feel at the elections of Ronald Reagan and George W Bush or a prescient warning of Republican horrors to come. (Greenberg, who died earlier this year, wrote it during Barack Obama’s second term in 2013.)
