'Three Changes' parades its family unpleasantness

Nasty often makes for intriguing theater; unfortunately, that's not the case here.

"Three Changes" at off-Broadway's Playwrights Horizons is a dull, dispiriting black comedy, short on laughs, insight or credible characters.

The play is dispiriting on several levels.

First, it's difficult to watch accomplished actors such as Dylan McDermott, Maura Tierney and Scott Cohen struggle with their portrayals of incomplete, unlikely and unappetizing folk. McDermott and Tierney play an Upper West Side Manhattan couple whose life is interrupted by the arrival of the man's older brother (Cohen), an egocentric Hollywood television writer who decides to make himself at home.

Second, Silver is at sea, too. Best known for such quirky laugh-getters as "Pterodactyls" and "The Food Chain," he seems to have lost his deft sense of the absurd, an off-kilter world view tinged with a touch of tragedy. The playwright usually has a light touch even when things are spinning out of control.

And things unravel quickly in "Three Changes," when long-simmering animosity between the two brothers erupts. The California interloper certainly gives the couple reasons to dislike him. Before you know it, the man has asked an obnoxious young hustler (Brian J. Smith) to move in, too. Why both men are not thrown out of the apartment is never exactly clear. It certainly doesn't have anything to do with brotherly love.

But then the husband isn't exactly a good guy either. He is cheating on his wife with a department store sales clerk (Aya Cash), a young woman long on stridency and short on charm. What does he see in her?

The play's most puzzling creation, though, is the wife, an unfulfilled woman mourning her several miscarriages and disparaging her job laying out pages for a mail-order catalog company. Tierney manages to generate some sympathy for her character until the play's rather surprising and unsatisfying conclusion.

Much of "Three Changes" focuses on sibling rivalry, extended shouting matches between the two brothers. Cohen's character decides to write about his family and his brother is front and center in the book.

Despite the high-decibel conversations, the evening wanders, marking time at a slow pace that director Wilson Milam is unable to enliven. We all know family ties can be constricting but in "Three Changes" they strangle the theatricality out of Silver's sour little play.