When We Were Young and Unafraid

The great Cherry Jones (The Glass Menagerie) returns to the boards in a new play by Sarah Treem, set at a bed-and-breakfast that serves as an oasis of safety for young women in the early 1970s. Zoe Kazan plays a troubled runaway who threatens the place’s peace; Pam MacKinnon (Clybourne Park) directs. Sarah Treem’s self-defeating drama When We Were Young and Unafraid begins with a promising setting: a ’60s bed-and-breakfast doubling as a women’s shelter, where Agnes (Jones) offers succor to domestic-violence escapees. In the play’s competent first moment, Agnes and her 16-year-old daughter, Penny (Morgan Saylor), bicker sweetly. Our hopes rise: a work about women saving women! But Treem soon buries the duo under a series of hacky, over-machined, self-contradictory scenes, all veneered with appeals to sisterhood.