The cast of The Fever Syndrome
(Picture: Ellie Kurttz)No prizes for guessing what attracted Robert Lindsay to this finely-crafted but overwrought American family drama. His part is (fictional) IVF pioneer Richard Myers, a growly Manhattan patriarch raging against his three warring children and long-suffering third wife even as Parkinson’s disease racks his body.
It calls for acting with a capital A, the sort of stuff that wins awards for able-bodied thesps. Lindsay duly delivers, leading a strong ensemble through a rollercoaster of issue-driven emotion. Alexis Zegerman’s script will be compared to Succession, but it owes a more obvious debt to the parlour psychodramas of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams et al. And Roxana Silbert’s polished production can’t quite disguise how schematic and thematically overstuffed it is.
Myers pursued test-tube perfection – healthy babies for all – but celebrates mess and chaos. This is one of many antagonistic contradictions that Zegerman plants like landmines through the script. Daughter Dot works for the journal Science but her husband is a disgraced researcher, a beta male and possibly a crypto-Catholic, while Myers’ only grandchild, Lily, has inherited a potentially fatal, medically expensive fever syndrome.
Dot’s twin half-brothers Thomas and Anthony are a gay successful painter with an ex-Marine, ex-coke-addict lover, and a dodgy cryptocurrency entrepreneur with unhealthy stepmommy issues. Each scene seems to involve three meltdowns, four headline topics, and at least one person overhearing something they shouldn’t.
There’s a marriage proposal, wistful Chopin on the piano, a laboured running gag about American football, and a ghost. Myers’ offspring blurt out their vulnerability or their greed between dinner and breakfast. Oh, did I mention that it all takes place over 24 hours before Myers is due to receive a prestigious Lasker Award for science?
It’s always a pleasure to watch Lindsay, who plays Myers like a faltering and therefore more dangerous lion. Lisa Dillon is very good as the dislikeable Dot, and equalled by Bo Poraj in the difficult role as her husband Nate. He somehow manages to issue the line “don’t cut off my opinion, it’s the only appendage I have left” with both conviction and dignity in a scene which requires him to call time on his marriage, change his mind, and polish his wife’s shoes.
Alexandra Gilbreath is impressive too as Myers’ unthanked younger wife Megan, sometimes spirited, often talked over, briefly sensual. Nancy Allsop is terrific as the stroppy Lily. Hell, I’d like to applaud the whole cast for their ability to shift emotional gear here, skillfully and repeatedly, like rally drivers on gravel.
Myers’ unsuitable New York brownstone is succinctly rendered by designer Lizzie Clachan as an advent calendar of partially-seen, cramped rooms. It’s hard to fault Silbert’s direction or the cast’s performances as they negotiate the confected philosophical debates and engineered flashpoints of Zegerman’s script. There’s much to enjoy here, as long as you don’t mind being taken for a ride.
