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Michael Sedano

Frances Conroy conducts an acting lesson on upstaging your fellow actors in the Mark Taper Forum’s production, through March 21, of Frank D. Gilroy’s “The Subject Was Roses.”

Conroy’s imposing presence over this cast including Martin Sheen and Brian Geraghty is reason enough to make the trek to the top of Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill and foot the $9 parking tab. That such superb drama comes with it makes a lucky bonus.

Costume Designer Laura Bauer dresses Conroy’s Nettie Cleary in faded floral prints, their lost vibrancy a poignant mirror for Nettie’s defeated ethos. Conroy conducts her character with affectless facial expression and gesture. Despite the joyousness of the setting—an “Eisenhower” soldier’s jacket on a hanger, a “Welcome home Timmy” banner hanging above the living room—without saying a word, it’s obvious Nettie is a lifelong casualty of her own life. Tellingly, only in the final speech of the first scene does Nettie’s son, Geraghty, call Nettie “Mom.” As a whole, the family is walking wounded tiptoeing around their tired rituals of abuse and emotional extortion fueled by bitter regret.

Michael Ritchie’s tenure as the Taper’s Artistic Director has been marked with more misses than hits, particularly his failure to sponsor new work. It’s refreshing to note he’s done something right in bringing back this 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Drama gem as a last-minute replacement for the planned revival of David Mamet's 1988 "Speed-the-Plow."

Gilroy’s play exists in movie form, featuring Jack Albertson and Patricia Neal. Neal was nominated for an Oscar, Albertson won an Oscar in the role Sheen fills at the Taper. Interestingly, Sheen played the Timmy role on Broadway, and the film.

I suppose Martin Sheen is well-known to anyone who follows popular media. For sure, he is the “name” in this play, and is the only actor of the three to get warm applause when he walks on stage. He does a grand Irish accent and pulls off sly humor as the tightwad who doesn’t want his wife to know how much money the family owns (fourteen thousand three hundred fiftyseven dollars).

I did not recognize the name Brian Geraghty, only today learning he’s in a hit movie, “The Hurt Locker,” where he plays a U.S. soldier in Iraq. The actor has the thin frame that fits the role of an Infantry soldier, the character earning the Combat Infantry Man badge designating extended time on the battlefield engaging the enemy. With the Hell this kid's been through, it's a wonder he puts up with the crap his father dishes out. With one neighbor’s son killed, another crippled, the Cleary family feels itself lucky to have Timmy home unscathed. But the play’s not about returning combat veterans nor the toll of war on civilians. Conroy’s focus is the dysfunctional family that threatens, gangs up on one another, leverages emotion as a substitute for affection.

I had not shared Frances Conroy’s work heretofore, but hers is a name I’ll remember now. A Juilliard alumna, her stage career includes Obie and Tony awards, and her television work includes four Emmy nominations for “Six Feet Under,” garnering a Golden Globe for that role. With such credentials, Conroy’s dominance on the Taper stage is no star-is-born surprise. But none of that matters, th