iBroadway

Here is your assignment: Go to the Manhattan Theatre Club site and click to the page for From Up Here and buy your tickets to this amazing show. It’s playwright Liz Flahive’s debut work and it is so, so, so good. I’m already a big fan of Julie White’s ( I thought she was brilliant in The Little Dog Laughed), and was looking forward to seeing her anyway when we booked our tickets.

She was, as I expected, wonderful in the show, but the total of the production so far exceeds the sum of its parts that I can’t even begin to describe it. The plot is certainly the stuff of melodrama: It follows a “typical” suburban family dealing with the aftermath of some very scary behavior of the son’s. It could easily have been a live-action movie of the week, but it’s not. It’s very funny (and only partly in a gallows way), and the characterizations are dead on, from the disaffected teenage boy and his rebellious sister, to the over-achiever Mom, her second husband and her will-o-the whisp sister, back from foreign climes to “make a difference” in the kid’s life.

But it’s not just in the writing: Leigh Silverman’s direction is subtle and nuanced and extremely precise.

Oh, man, I lurved it. Go see it. It’s good.