‘Tree’ Connects With Touch of Humanity

“There’s one in every family,” several audience members murmured knowingly during intermission at Actors Alley’s “Far From the Tree.” As the good-for-nothing, foul-mouthed huckster Nick Beringer, Darcy Belsher skillfully mixes fearful youth with callow bravado, rash impudence and flashes of sensitive maturity. He is a boy you want to both slap and hug.

In Louis Felder’s tragedy, 16-year-old Nick shows up at his father’s dingy little apartment after being thrown out by his mother. Living on the odd voice-over job, father Fred (Sam Ingraffia) attempts to live in total freedom, advising his son, “you got to learn to be happy without people,” because “love is a form of codependency; it’s a form of control.” Amid the psycho-babble of the late 1980s, these two men search for a human connection.

Felder isn’t interested in happy endings or pat answers. These are two men, both sensitively portrayed by Belsher and Ingraffia, defeated by their own self-destructive impulses, wavering on the brink of loneliness.

Director Marcia Rodd doesn’t sugar-coat Felder’s script. Instead she balances the repulsive and pathetic aspects of father and son with glimmers of hopeful humanity lost or gained.

* “Far From the Tree,” Actors Alley at the El Portal Theater, 5269 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends May 4. $16. (818) 508-4200. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.