‘Yard Sale’ Full of Heartfelt Family Issues

“Yard Sale,” a new play developed at Company of Angels, succeeds as a slice-of-life ensemble piece through deceptively unglamorous emotional honesty.

Tish Smiley’s portrait of the parent-child dynamics in a modern dysfunctional middle-class family doesn’t sparkle with clever lines or newly mined insights. In fact, there’s a lot of familiar territory in this story about three daughters and a son struggling to break free of the baggage they’ve inherited from their mean-spirited mother, Dotty (Mary-Margaret Lewis).

But that very familiarity situated in everyday experience will strike a nerve in anyone who has ever dealt with family issues--which is to say, everyone.

There’s heartfelt--and sometimes heartbreaking--authenticity in the thoughtless wounds Dotty inflicts on her children, and in their self-protective retaliation. Envious of her wealthier friends, disgusted with her amiable but unambitious husband (Don Oscar Smith), and bitter about the prospects ahead, Dotty approaches her weekend yard sale not as a divestiture of dead wood but as the confirmation that “we’re white-trash poor.”

Inevitably, she takes her resentments out on her children, calling her free-spirited daughter (Kate Asner) “a whore,” and dismissing as “an idiot” the son (David Blanchard) who carries on the family legacy of unhappy marriages (to relentlessly gossipy Nancy Reed). Another daughter (Allegra Swift) works with emergency relief teams in foreign countries to get as far from home as possible.

Despite a few heavy-handed moments and occasional overwrought lines, director Carter Cole steers clear of soap opera exaggeration, furthering his naturalistic staging with an impressively detailed garage and front porch set. Like most yard sales, this one’s a good bet for bargain hunters.

* “Yard Sale,” Company of Angels, 2106 Hyperion Ave., Silver Lake. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends March 25. $10. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 2 hours.