Evening Review All Afternoon – Erin Keleman makes her stage debut as the prickly stepdaughter | stage

THere are many clever insights into Anna Ziegler’s spare and sensitive film, which features the exciting theatrical debut of screen star Erin Keleman. She couldn’t be more confident as Delilah, the posh half-American daughter in mourning, who has a prickly relationship with her conceited British stepmother, Jennifer (Anastasia Healy).

Brilliantly directed by Diane Zora, the play is both a narration (narrated by the women in the third person) and a representation of their developing relationship within an onstage circle, which takes place as they psychologically orbit each other. We see them meeting, clashing and misunderstanding each other while confessing to us their inner worlds, outside of this dramatic circle.

Delilah’s Jamaican-born, Brooklyn-based mother died at the age of 39 from cancer. Unspoken anger, mixed with sadness, sears her first encounters with her new, always English, stepmother. Jennifer is seven years older than Delilah’s father, John, and has spent her life unmarried until now, taking care of her late mother.

Delilah is annoyed by Jennifer’s maternal intrusion, taunts her with games of one-upmanship (“Daddy doesn’t keep anything from me”), and is like granite in her rejection of Jennifer’s overtures. But Kellyman also allows you to see her character’s weakness and fragmentation, and feel her emotional push and pull toward Jennifer.

Hille, who also gives an impressive performance, exudes quiet remorse for her character’s life, making you cringe to hear every uncertain word from Jennifer and piece together her backstory. However, there’s not enough meat there, and Jennifer is too much of a type, painfully understated in her Britishness and self-deprecating to the point of cliché.

She looks like one of Anita Bruckner’s socially awkward, librarian-like women from bygone Britain who works in an administrative job (organizing medical records) and finds herself married, middle-aged, and can’t believe this belated prosperity. John, for his part, stays offstage and you don’t quite believe in him, or this marriage either. The humor lightens the tone but feels like it’s trying to lighten the story. It’s a tame and a bit bland film too, which hampers the finely captured emotional drama between the women.

The play’s title is taken from a Wallace Stevens poem: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, about views on the same scene. It deals with a kind of emotional Rashomon effect as we try to figure out who is right or wrong, the victim or the villain (if there is one). Delilah becomes suspicious of Jennifer and this fuels a melodramatic plot that verges on psychotic territory but doesn’t have enough of a payoff.

However, there are riches here and the play has an incredibly original focus. In its best moments, it feels like a modern-day version of Hamlet, complete with the ghost of a vengeful parent and the paralysis of a grieving child.

Basia Bińkowska’s set design is full of beautiful strangeness: there is a play with shadow and a clever use of props, which are initially placed on a shelf. The monochromatic wash of the collection suggests a Maggie Nelson kind of blue, the madness of sadness, but also a dream world with this melancholic tint.

The play’s power lies, ultimately, in its liminal spaces: between dream, psychosis, and reality, between imagination and its creation, and between the tragedy of death and the healing power contained therein.