Natalie Lander, Jonathan Slavin, Andy Robinson, and Liza Seneca Photo by Carol Rosegg

Although a year has passed, Patrick, a retired professor, still cannot cope with the loss of his wife to cancer. Although Patrick himself is not Jewish, his wife had been, so he speaks with a rabbi about the best way to honor his spouse at the unveiling of her tombstone. In their discussion, Patrick learns about the impending Jewish holiday of Sukkot which requires Jews to build a sukkah–an outdoor booth–to live in for the seven days of the festival and to rejoice. Desperate for a way to connect to his late wife, Patrick builds the sukkah and settles into it. He is reluctantly joined there by his son Asher, who had been his mother's main support during her illness and is adrift in his own trauma. Then Patrick's two daughters–the authoritative Mairead and the free-spirited Eden–who are living their own lives far from the family home, arrive to stay for the unveiling. The seven days they all spend under Patrick's desperate demands to rejoice while staying in the sukkah open up the painful fractures of this still connected family, in ways that are often comical and sometimes gutting.

The company makes you really believe that this is a family, with the excellent Andy Robinson playing Patrick, a man who feels he has lost all sense of who he is. Even at Patrick's most dire and aggravating moments, he generates both understanding and solid laughter.

Jonathan Slavin takes the spotlight with his wry, witty and damaged Asher. Jobless, living with his father, and still shell-shocked from being the caretaker son for his dying mother, Asher resents everyone else for having a life and for insisting he must have one too. Yet Jonathan Slavin makes Asher likable and fun to watch.

Another person adrift, though she does not want to think about that, is Eden, the baby of the family. Natalie Lander is really winning as this likable and also annoyingly detached character and lets us see her struggle to contain her actual fear of the future.

Asher and Eden both resent Mairead, who is determined to have the family face the realities they are avoiding. In an expert performance, Liza Seneca makes us sympathize with Mairead's care for her family, her aggravation with her siblings, and her need to plan, even before we fully understand her motivations.

Director Joel Zwick deftly moves Sukkot onward, allowing the family dynamics to develop naturally and recognizably. He understands Matthew Leavitt's smooth interweaving of humor and drama and ensures that the two work together and never conflict.

Naturally, a sukkah built by a man who had never seen such a structure before could have been a convenient hook for easy comedy, but Mark Mendelson's set provides an ideal large booth that frames the show rather than intruding upon it. Colleen Doherty's lighting and Chris Moscatiello's sound designs add their own levels of tangibility to the action onstage and can even reach into the surreal. The costumes by Caitlin Cisek and Oriana Sophia well define the personalities of each of the characters who occupy this unusual environment.

Sukkot is very well worth the watching. If Matthew Leavitt's script has any inconsistencies, they are all neatly buried by the engrossing quality of the situation and the people presented. We may never know if this family will truly bounce back, but we do care about them, and Sukkot leaves us with the belief that they will continue to evolve and try to keep up hope even after the show itself ends.