Motherly Advice Askew

If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother, the saying goes. And if there’s a key to unraveling Canadian playwright Larry Fineberg’s intellectually probing but emotionally bewildering new downbeat drama, “Failure of Nerve,” it lies in the icy matriarchal presence supplied by Barbara Bain’s gripping performance for Playwrights’ Arena at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

“Don’t give in to a failure of nerve,” Bain’s imperious, 67-year-old Irma urges her daughter, Susan (Elizabeth Cava), a psychiatrist in the throes of a life crisis. “Have the courage to see it through.”

Unfortunately, Irma’s notion of courage amounts only to stoic endurance--”getting through” life within the strict confines of propriety.

Irma is so good at not seeing unpleasant realities that the death of her other daughter years earlier has driven her blind, a disability that Bain skillfully leverages into a mechanism of controlling others.

Susan’s psychiatric training provides little defense against Irma’s ability to push her buttons of insecurity. After the troubled Susan breaks up with her kind but frustrated boyfriend, Mark (Jeff LeBeau, over an infidelity, Irma’s first reaction is to ask if Susan was at fault.

A lifetime of undermined self-confidence like this explains, at least partially, Susan’s decision to violate her profession’s sacrosanct taboo and become emotionally involved with her patient, Kate (Bain’s real-life daughter Juliet Landau), a sociopathic waif who brings nothing but trouble to those around her.

A convincing emotional predator, Landau’s Kate unerringly homes in on Susan’s vulnerabilities. Reversing their therapist-patient relationship, Kate points out that Susan worries “so much about crossing lines that you’re all boxed in.” Kate lures Susan out of her box, not with a siren call to the dark side she inhabits, but rather with a promise of loyal friendship. Susan takes the bait, with disastrous consequences.

Bad decisions are plentiful in Fineberg’s universe. Mark’s sister, Jane (Gigi Bermingham), an icon of level-headed, well-adjusted domesticity and motherhood, commits the most unfathomable blunder of all with her new infant.

There’s a hopeless tone to the predictable unfolding tragedy that runs counter to the American sensibility Hemingway articulated in his line “Man can be destroyed but not defeated.” Here the defeat is a given, the narrative only a confirmation.

While Kate ultimately emerges as much a victim as her prey, her amoral nature begs for more ambiguity than Jon Lawrence Rivera’s staging permits. Though Susan is quick to excuse Kate’s transgressions as circumstantial, there’s no reason we need to--or believe that Kate is truly repentant in the end, for that matter.

Playing for sympathy is the wrong strategy here--ultimately, it’s hard to feel sorry for characters whose misfortunes are not the result of circumstances they can’t control, but rather of their own idiotic choices.

“Failure of Nerve,” Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., Los Angeles. Fridays, Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Sept. 15. $15-20. (213) 473-0640 or (213) 627-4473. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.