In his often very funny play, these two Yuletides, twenty years apart, with their trappings of tinsel and a crooning Bing Crosby, stand for a half-hearted bid to fit into a culture which is constantly othering them.
Except it’s not half-hearted for fey former movie star Julie (Jennifer Westfeldt) who throws herself into making the turkey and trimmings in 1980, then the consommé and beef bourguignon in 2000.
Around her relentless optimism there’s a toxic stew of disappointment and bad parenting. In their grand rent-controlled Manhattan apartment, husband Ben is hiding an affair, and his sister Faye (Tracy-Ann Oberman) is not hiding her bitter resentment at being frozen out by their now dying mother when she fell pregnant by a roughneck from the neighbourhood.
In the evening’s most enjoyable performance, Faye is bracingly vocal about her lost opportunities and displeasure with peculiar daughter Shelley, and lumpen husband Mort.
Meanwhile Julie and Ben’s golden college student son Scotty (Alexander Marks) shows a feckless lack of ambition compared to his restlessly lonely friend Jeff (Sam Marks) who is clearly hoping to adopt them all as his surrogate family.
The first half is set straight after Reagan’s election, and his slowness in addressing the AIDs epidemic will come to haunt the family.
Act II arrives just after George W Bush’s contested election win, and as a reduced group gather in the now shabby apartment with property speculators circling, the foreshadow of 911 is palpable.
There’s a delicious seam of dark humour that runs through Greenberg’s play and is mined for every nugget by Oberman’s larger than life, lavishly bouffed Faye and the truth-skewering naif Julie.
A revelation over a ruby necklace reverberates two decades later as the crushing legacy of family dynamics is explored.
At two and a half hours, Blanche McIntyre’s production is overly long and loses focus in the second half. And given the seismic upheaval of the subsequent Trump presidencies this work from 2013 harking back to the noughties feels oddly dated.
The Assembled Parties runs at Hampstead Theatre until November 22.
