All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
    — Leo Tolstoy

The most remarkable thing about Joel Drake Johnson’s Four Places is how it prepares you for what’s to come in its very first scene and still manages to surprise you. Opening in an intimate black box theatre at the Bramble Arts Loft, the 4 Chair Theatre production of the play is the first since the untimely passing of the playwright in 2020.

Bob Pinta’s set is simple but elegant. Four places: the interior of a car, and a restaurant lobby, a table in the back, and the ladies restroom. We begin with middle-aged siblings Ellen and Warren in a parked car, summoning up their courage. They’re picking up their mother, Peggy, for her weekly lunch at her favorite restaurant, but there’s a slight variation in the routine; this is Warren’s first time joining them and they are worried that their mother will suspect something is not quite right. And she would be right. This is not an ordinary lunch date but an ambush.

The play follows a fairly standard structure: a slow build up, explosive revelations, and then the aftermath. What isn’t quite standard is how mundane all but one of the revelations is (and even that one is only slightly exaggerated for dramatic effect), and how rather than detracting from the drama, that mundanity actually elevates it.

The question of how to manage an aging parent is one that most people in the world will have to deal with and Four Places hits very differently based on the age of the viewer—when the lights came up, the audience members of a certain age were visibly distraught, several to the point of tears—and I wondered if I would have been as moved had I been a decade or so younger.

Director Lauren Berman directs with an able hand and an obvious affection for the material. The set is simple, the lighting (Elliot DePappe) non-fussy, and the sound design (Aaron Harris Woodstein) unobtrusive. The focus is on the script and the actors.

And a fine quartet of actors they are. Andrea Uppling and Michael Stejskal play Ellen and Warren with commitment and focus. Stejskal has the more unsympathetic part, being that his Warren has to be the heavy for the bulk of the play, and we don’t really learn much about him until the last few scenes, but the actor does remarkable work communicating his character’s unhappiness and emotional isolation, not just from his mother and sister, but also everyone else in his life, including in a fashion, himself.

Andrea Uppling gives a more restrained and controlled performance that is none the less powerful for its interiority. Forced to mediate between Warren and her mother, she doesn’t really get a big “acting” moment until the end. She doesn’t need one. Just the way she leans back against a bathroom stall while her mother prattles on inside tells us everything we need to know about the burdens her character bears. Her moment of truth in the return car ride is one of the few (the only?) moments of genuine uplift in the play.

In a small but crucial role—not in terms of plot, but in terms of providing levity and a respite from the increasing unpleasantness of the lunch conversation—Amber Dow is funny and beautifully passive-aggressive as the waitress who is only concerned with Peggy’s dining experience. It’s not much of a part, but she does the best anyone could with it.

Then we come to Valerie Gorman, who plays Peggy, and is—here’s me trying not to descend into hyperbole—absolutely fantastic. I’m not sure I’ve ever looked so hard for some chink in an actor’s armor; some indication of artifice or craft; something to indicate that this is an actor playing a part. It’s a flinty, intelligent performance, brimming with sardonic wit, and crucially, devoid of sentimentality. It doesn’t matter what is required: her gossipy chatting in the car; her precisely targeted digs at her children, eviscerating them with scalpel-like precision; her casual dismissal of her son’s desired inner life with a shockingly cruel, “That’s just a fantasy, baby boy”; and finally, her breakdown: she is, in a word, flawless. And the scene where she refuses to leave the restroom, beseeching her daughter to reveal to her fate is unbearably devastating.

Four Places is more than just about adult children having to deal with a parent who can no longer take care of themselves. On a more universal level it questions if we can ever know anyone else, even the members of our own family. Peggy, Warren, and Ellen, are immediately related by blood and have spent a large portion of their lives together, but they are as strangers. Peggy is as ignorant of her children’s emotional needs and lives as they are of hers. She just knows how to role-play her part better than they do. At the end of the play, when Warren and Ellen decide that their mother does indeed love them, the optimist in me wants to cheer but the cynic in me wonders if that is a fiction that the three characters need to believe is true in order to keep functioning.

And does it matter either way?

As Johnson writes, in one of the best lines in the play, “The poetry is in the details.”

Four Places
Bramble Arts Lofts
Thurs-Sat at 7:30; Sun at 3
ends on November 2, 2025
for tickets, visit 4 Chairs Theatre