Playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis has made a career out of getting audiences to root for flawed working class New Yorkers.
This Pulitzer Prize-winning tale from 2014 presents knotty questions about 'what's the right thing to do?'
Several characters lie, behave badly, or are not what they seem, yet Adly Guirgis humanely extends them the possibility of love and redemption.
Fresh from playing King Lear, Danny Sapani is on engaging, raging form as an altogether more cantankerous foul-mouthed patriarch.
After the death of his wife, Pops Washington has hit the booze in a gone-to-seed rent controlled Manhattan apartment (represented too literally in Max Jones, cluttered, awkward set) with ex-con son Junior, his recovering addict friend Oswaldo, and girlfriend - possibly sex worker - Lulu, who all call him 'Dad.'
Adly Guirgis has a brilliant ear for entertaining, witty dialogue and director Michael Longhurst lets their enjoyable banter meander over Pops' Whisky breakfast before springing the play's conundrum.
Having endured decades of racism as a Black cop in the NYPD, Pops was invalided out when he was shot while off duty by a rookie white colleague.
He's been stubbornly pressing a lawsuit against the NYPD, but has overplayed his hand. Now the authorities are turning the screw - threatening everything from eviction to arrest - to make him settle.
Pops still has a hand to play, and watching him finesse it is quite a trip - especially if it means besting his ex partner's bullying Lieutenant fiancee, (Daniel Lapaine) who is sent to negotiate.
A spiritual resurrection, of sorts, also arrives in the form of Ayesha Antoine's caricatured canny 'Church Lady,' there's an alarming burst of violence when Oswaldo spectacularly falls off the wagon, and a touchingly gruff hospital bedside chat when Pops and Junior set aside their shame and anger.
The supporting characters are thinly drawn, which lessens the dramatic impact and the comic/tragic tone can be uneven, but Tiffany Gray makes an assured debut as the street smart Lulu, and Judith Roddy ably conveys the torn anguish of Pop's ex partner Audrey O'Connor.
But it's Sapani's show, and even when Pops is at his most wrong-headed, we're with him all the way.
Between Riverside and Crazy runs at Hampstead Theatre until June 15.
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