Three sisters The Glider wafts into family history BY SALLY CRAGIN
	The Glider By Kate Snodgrass. Directed by Wesley Savick. Set by Richard Chambers. Costumes by Rachel Padula-Shufelt. Lighting by Andrew Foley. Sound by Haddon Kime. With Birgit Huppuch, Kimberly Parker Green, and Laura Lee Latreille. At Boston Playwrights’ Theatre through November 14.

Kate Snodgrass’s The Glider, which is making its debut at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, is a suspenseful one-act. Three sisters reunite in the family’s Michigan lakeside home after the widowed matriarch has died. Fran left home early and has wandered the globe taking pictures of exotic wildlife and landscapes for National Geographic. No surprise that the sisters who remained, nervous Essie and placid Chrissy, are a little resentful of this would-be prodigal’s return. As The Glider unfolds during a bibulous evening after the funeral, the siblings reminiscence and relive pivotal scenes from their shared childhood.

Is there a real "creature" living in the lake? How important is it that their mother be buried alongside their alcoholic father? And, most important, what will become of the beloved house? Snodgrass, who heads up Boston University’s Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and lectures in its graduate playwriting program, has constructed a complex and layered story.

The Glider has plenty to say about alcoholic-family dynamics and the rigidity of conventional gender roles. Although the family drunk is long gone, the specter of the disease hangs over those who are left. Fran is blunt, and most comfortable finding solutions for others, even though she’s come home only a handful of times in the score of years since she bolted. Her absence has sat badly with tightly wound middle sister Essie, who’s a nervous wreck around her confident older sibling, defensive and annoyed yet still wishing everyone could get along. All Fran has to do is give Essie a poke and her hands fly up in indignation or she starts nervously scrubbing the coffee table. But the real conundrum is little sister Chrissy. At first, it seems she’s the victim. Abandoned by her adored older sister while still a child, she’s the one who tended to Momma in her final years. Has she missed out on the best years of her life? Or will she get the caretaker’s benediction: the amelioration of differences and conflict?

Snodgrass has a firm grasp on the tangled psychology and entwined passions in a family of sisters. Unfortunately, the flaws in this work have to do with simple plot points and tonal inconsistencies that don’t jibe with the personalities on stage, as well as with what turn out to be red herrings. Most glaring is the question of Essie’s unseen husband. It seems Max has something going on with Chrissy, but you don’t know how serious the relationship is, and that makes it hard to parse Essie’s conflicted feelings about her little sister. Momma, who’s represented on stage by ashes in a stylish blue urn, also remains mysterious: though something dramatic happened to drive Fran away years ago, Momma apparently spent her years as a widow mellowing out and yearning for her beloved older daughter.

Wesley Savick has directed the play as if more were at stake than one might think at first glance, and the result is watchable, even enthralling. But some of the goings-on play like daytime drama — there are pregnant pauses and too many occasions where an incipient catfight means two sisters talk at once, making it difficult to hear what seem to be significant plot points. The performances are all solid, and if at times Birgit Huppuch overstates Essie’s brittleness, it’s not easy: acting jumpy, like acting drunk, requires finesse. This Laura Lee Latreille shows in a variety of ways as Fran airs her resentments and demonstrates how easy it is to bully Essie. And newcomer Kimberly Parker Green does a creditable job as long-suffering Chrissy. Haddon Kime’s sound effects (nighttime insect buzz, melancholy guitar strumming from the neighbor across the water) are evocative without being intrusive, and Andrew Foley’s lighting design, which needs to represent moonlight as well as interior illumination, does well by Richard Chambers’s creatively accoutered cabin (tool bench, vintage furniture, eaves stuffed with clutter). All in all, this Glider is easy to coast along with.