An Uneasy Rapport

Like father, like daughter. That sentimental notion, usually cooed to emphasize an endearing trait shared across the generation gap, takes on a bone-chilling dimension in I’m Gonna Pray for You So Hard, a potently acted but punishing drama by Halley Feiffer about the destructive relationship between a famous playwright and his daughter, an aspiring actress. Reed Birney, among New York’s hardest-working stage actors, is often cast as a retiring type (as he was last fall in You Got Older, or, memorably, in Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation). Here he whips a 180 without leaving any visible skid marks to portray David, a ferociously nasty Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, in whose cozy Upper West Side kitchen much of the play, which opened on Tuesday night, takes place. David is in full vitriolic flight as the play begins, in the middle of a scabrous attack on the bane of all theater artists (duh, critics) that’s liberally doused with foul language and laced with homophobia. The next victim of his verbal assaults is the director who has failed to cast his daughter, Ella, played by Betty Gilpin, as Nina in an avant-garde production of The Seagull. “Bertrand’s an old bag,” he fumes about the director. “A has-been — a joke. A formerly-famous-now-completely-washed-up hack!” This did not prevent David from sending the man his latest work in progress, and the hack’s polite note claiming he’s too busy to stage it might have something to do with David’s dudgeon. Then again, it might not. As written by Ms. Feiffer, David seems to need no particular impetus for his biliousness. (Let’s not draw any conclusions from the slightly discomfiting fact that Ms. Feiffer is an actress and the daughter of Jules Feiffer, the celebrated cartoonist who has also written plays.)