This Apartment Comes With Skeletons Hanging in the Closet

Family secrets tumble out of the past in Israel Horovitz’s “My Old Lady.” This kind of clearing of the domestic cupboard is an awfully familiar subject for American drama. Horovitz attempts to distinguish his treatment of it by setting the action in Paris.

The setting provides some room for rumination on cross-cultural as well as intra-family issues. Yet the play, in a Mark Taper Forum production at the Doolittle Theatre in Hollywood, is more successful at unearthing family drama than in exploring transatlantic themes, which tend to devolve here into stereotypes about Americans and Europeans.

Even with the family material, Horovitz’s success is modest. The play feels muffled by its preoccupation with past events that are only discussed, not shown. Horovitz’s attempt to bring the drama into the present and the future isn’t entirely convincing.

Still, under David Esbjornson’s direction, the play provides a platform for a charged performance by Peter Friedman as a troubled American in Paris--a self-defined loser who nevertheless powers the play’s momentum with his unrelenting search for his own history.

Detailed discussion of “My Old Lady” is difficult without revealing some of the plot’s pivotal moments. Anyone who’s seeing the play and wants to be totally surprised by its revelations may want to postpone reading the rest of this review for now.

But first, the set-up: Mathias Gold (Friedman), 50, has inherited a Paris apartment from his father, from whom he has been estranged most of his life. Virtually penniless and a lonely veteran of three failed marriages, Mathias hopes to sell the flat quickly and return to America.

Arriving in Paris, he finds two women still living in the apartment: nonagenarian Mathilde (Sian Phillips) and her 50ish daughter Chloe (Jan Maxwell).

Mathias soon learns that his father’s below-market purchase of the apartment from Mathilde was contingent on a proviso that she can remain there until she dies. Even worse for Mathias, his father had agreed to pay a monthly fee for Mathilde’s expenses--a debt that Mathias has now inherited.

Chloe initially threatens legal action if Mathias tries to evict the duo, but all three characters soon conclude that coercion probably won’t resolve their conflicts. So they settle in for a series of conversations that evolve into probes of the past. Both of the younger people become aware of hitherto unknown family ties.

Despite his excessive drinking, or maybe because of it, Friedman’s Mathias eloquently makes the case that his life was wrecked by his father. Although Mathilde argues that a 50-year-old should assume responsibility for his own life, Mathias finally spits out a revelation of his own that shakes up Mathilde’s and Chloe’s assumptions.

Friedman has a picturesque ring of matted hair around his largely bald pate that helps endow Mathias’ more neurotic moments with an element of charm. And he has a fierce energy that elevates mere whining into a more profound existential rant. His climactic loss of composure is the most moving moment in the play.

Phillips’ Mathilde is generally luminous and dignified, but Phillips can’t quite hide the fact that she is almost three decades younger than her character. Mathilde is stuck with a common curse of colorful old women characters: She is allowed to name-drop her way through all of the famous bohemian residents of Paris she knew.

Maxwell’s Chloe also looks a bit younger than her character. She is asked to make an enormous leap from her initial fury at Mathias to, well, the opposite emotion, as she learns to regard him as a fellow wounded child. Maxwell’s performance is more convincing in this regard than is Horovitz’s script, which feels especially contorted in the final scene to provide a thoroughly upbeat ending.

Conveniently enough, Mathilde and Chloe have worked as English teachers, so the use of English throughout most of the play doesn’t feel odd, until they continue to use it in a confrontation between the two of them, when Mathias isn’t in the room.

John Lee Beatty designed a sitting room that looks well lived-in. Jon Gottlieb’s sound, including original music by Peter Golub, helps ease the transitions.

“My Old Lady” isn’t as compelling as some of Horovitz’s other recent plays produced in 99-seat venues in L.A., probably because those plays were more urgently in the present tense. The characters here are intriguing, but they feel constrained by the form that Horovitz chose.

*

“My Old Lady,” Doolittle Theatre, 1615 N. Vine St., Hollywood. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m.; except added 2:30 p.m. performance on Feb. 6; Feb. 10, 2:30 p.m. only. Ends Feb. 10. $30-$44. (213) 628-2772.

Peter Friedman ... Mathias “Jim” Gold

Sian Phillips ... Mathilde Giffard

Jan Maxwell ... Chloe Giffard

A Mark Taper Forum production. By Israel Horovitz. Directed by David Esbjornson. Set by John Lee Beatty. Costumes by Elizabeth Hope Clancy. Lighting by Scott Zielinski. Sound by Jon Gottlieb. Original music by Peter Golub. Production stage manager James T. McDermott.