You can see why Felicity Huffman chose Taylor Mac's rich, dark satire for her stage comeback.
Paige - a once desperate housewife, who has abandoned cooking, cleaning and budgeting in favour of self improvement and art galleries - is a force of nature, and Huffman nails both her comic timing, and more unsettling side - even if she seems a little well groomed for a woman living on a landfill site.
'Caring' for the abusive husband who has had a stroke involves dressing him in humiliating nighties, dosing him with sedatives, and spraying him with water when he speaks.
In Park Theatre's intimate 200-seat space Ceci Calf's, cluttered cardboard box set conjures the fraying, jerry-built starter home the family never moved on from.
It's a visual metaphor for America's rotten dream, and Paige's family are like absurdist Beckettian characters living on a rubbish dump.
Son Isaac (Steffan Cennydd) dishonourably discharged from Afghanistan with PTSD-related addiction, is horrified to discover the home he dreamed of from afar is utterly dysfunctional.
Then there's Max (Thalia Dudek, brilliant) a feisty, but vulnerable "trans-masc" teen trying to find somewhere to belong.
Embracing the pronoun Hir, their rejection of rigid gender and societal definitions has also thrillingly liberated Paige from a miserable life as a downtrodden woman.
Dribbling hubby Arnold (Simon Startin) was a crummy dad, a faithless, violent husband, and the furious, redundant white male who lost his job to a Chinese-American woman.
The first half is belly laugh hilarious as Paige wreaks havoc, singing her praise for the new woke order, where everyone is Black, and gender obsolete.
But the second half curdles into something more painful. Paige's vengeful cruelty on the half-sentient Arnold starts to look as abusive as her spouse.
After spending three years picking up body parts, Isaac is sorely in need of love, but can only try to restore conventional order - and revert to violence when tempers fray.
Mac's theme and the play's energy also fizzle out. After showing us this dysfunctional family, there's nowhere for them to go.
But it's a refreshing, bracing upending of the happy family myth
Hir runs at Park Theatre in Finsbury Park until March 16.
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