The new play "I'm Gonna Pray for You So Hard" at the Atlantic Theatre Company takes a hard look at the perils of a life in the theatre while living your life in a theatre family. NY1’s Roma Torre filed this review.

You know the phrase “The sins of the father shall be visited upon the son.” Well, gender equality dictates those sins could equally befall a daughter.

In Halley Feiffer’s wickedly intense and uneven new play “I’m Gonna Pray For You So Hard”, the sinful father is a successful and ferociously embittered playwright. The daughter is an aspiring actress who’s about to enter her own real-life tragic drama.

David is an ogre of a man.  A brilliant Tony winning playwright, he rants at anything that gets in his way including critics, directors, even his own daughter, Ella. The bulk of this 90-minute play is dominated by Reed Birney's savage portrayal and he nails it with just the right mix of bile and black humor. 

Set mostly in David's Upper West Side kitchen, beautifully designed by Mark Wendland to heighten tensions, Ella and her dad are anxiously awaiting opening night reviews of an Off-Broadway production of “The Seagull” in which she plays Masha. And as David holds forth in a wine and drug fueled tirade, he constantly reminds his daughter that she's a disappointment because she failed to land the lead role of Nina.    

Given Birney's bravura performance, the play is entertaining to a point but the role of Ella is problematic. As written and portrayed, she's infantile, inexplicably squealing with glee as her father regales her with war stories of his past which she’s no doubt heard before. But she might as well not even be there because it's all his show and it's a soul crushing one.  

In the final scene, Betty Gilpin’s Ella is now five years older and it’s clear her father’s sins are being visited upon her.  And while Trip Cullman’s expert direction provides a shattering conclusion, I can only hope that in writing this play, Feiffer, the daughter of famed playwright and cartoonist Jules Feiffer, didn’t find inspiration in her own dear old dad.