The Off-Broadway Theatre Review: L.B. Browne’s “Safe House” Traps a Family Inside Its Own Fears
By Ross
Nobody has made this place particularly warm or welcoming is my first reaction walking into split/decision‘s production of Safe House at Theatre Row, NYC. Guns are hung among unfinished walls, fluorescent lights and bare bulbs expose every rough edge, and the whole space feels like infrastructure still waiting for the catastrophe it was built to survive. Rock continues to drive another screw into the wall, and his wife Slipper watches, her anxiety ricocheting through the room and hitting our nervous system. The election is only days away, we are told, and Rock is convinced that something terrible is coming. The bunker he has built is to protect his family, yet it already feels like it is the most unsafe place in the house, and that’s mainly because of him.
L.B. Browne’s play, directed with focus and care by Benjamin Viertel (The Brick’s Gutbelly), is a 90-minute exploration of a dysfunctional family trying to navigate a country, and one another, through fear, politics, illness, and trauma. Marc Kudisch (LCT’s Floyd Collins) gives Rock an intensity that is difficult to look at and impossible to look away from, while Karen Ziemba (Gingold’s Heartbreak House) as Slipper becomes the emotional fulcrum of the family, caught between loyalty to her husband and the increasingly disturbing world he has constructed around them. She is helpful to Rock’s basement cause, but her motivation comes from loyalty rather than conviction. Ziemba gives Slipper a complicated stillness, quietly watching, absorbing, and trying to keep the family functioning while knowing she cannot protect everyone. Her attempts to keep the peace become their own form of danger.
As the play revs up its internal engines, I wasn’t sure what to make of Rock. He is extreme, paranoid, and clearly frightened, but of what? The answer emerges through fragments, with Rock railing against progressive Democrats and the “communism” he believes they are bringing through ‘woke’ force. Kudisch makes those beliefs frightening through conviction. There is nothing performative about his certainty. We hear his words and shudder because we recognize that he genuinely believes them. The bunker becomes an extension of that worldview, with every screw and sheet of plywood part of his attempt to impose order on a world he believes is coming for him. Forest Entsminger’s raw plywood set makes the basement feel unfinished and stifling, while Mary Ellen Stebbins’ stark lighting leaves almost no warmth in the room. The bare bulbs and fluorescent glare expose every rough edge of the space, making this supposed shelter feel like infrastructure waiting for disaster to strike.
Their daughter Ashley, played by Anna Roman (Public’s Girl, Interrupted), has inherited the role of family peacekeeper, and the reasons become clearer the deeper we dive. She is forced to navigate a dynamic that has become increasingly impossible to contain, especially when Claire, the lost and father-favoured daughter, suddenly returns. Grace Church detonates the carefully contained family dynamic with Claire’s return, while her counterpart, Julianna Layne as Young Claire, starts to appear in the play’s shifting memories and visions. We wonder where these images are coming from. Are we seeing a flashback or a hallucinatory vision of a relationship that was blown up months ago when Claire disappeared from the family?
Those moments are compelling pieces of a puzzle, giving us complex glimpses of the relationship between Claire and her father before everything fractured. Their shotgun history begins to explain the particular hold she has over Rock, unwrapping a side of him that has stayed packed away for a long time. And Glenn Seven Allen‘s appearance as Rock’s father, “The General,” reaches even further back into the wounds that have shaped him. “The General,” we learn, is long dead, having been killed in a war when Rock was a child, yet the man enters this world anyway, overflowing, at first, in bravado and toxic masculinity, a fantasy figure from his past that Rock cannot quite leave behind. The shifts between present, memory, and hallucination are helped along by Artone’s costumes and Liam Bellman-Sharp’s sound, which quietly add to the sense that this household is under constant pressure.
The play’s central distinction between protecting someone and controlling them becomes increasingly important as Claire’s return forces the family to take sides. This is where Safe House becomes most gripping. Rock’s intensity collides with Claire’s presence, Slipper’s attempts at mediation begin to fail, and Ashley is left trying to maintain a peace that may never have existed in the first place. The play’s many ideas begin competing for the same space without any of them able to take a deep, full breath. Dr. Merritt and Officer Moxley, both played solidly by Justin Lee Miller, add nuance and a paper trail to the story, but their climb down those stairs feels less essential to the family drama unfolding around them. An unseen visit might have created even more tension while keeping the focus inside the bunker. It is strongest when the focus stays tight on Rock and Slipper, or when Claire’s return cracks open the buried father-daughter relationship.
That crowded storytelling also makes Rock’s diagnosis an important and difficult question. How much should we understand about someone’s behaviour before understanding begins to look like forgiveness? Kudisch never makes that question comfortable. His Rock is frightening because his conviction feels authentic, while Ziemba makes Slipper heartbreaking because her loyalty has become part of what keeps the family trapped. Anna Roman’s Ashley absorbs the fractures around her, while Grace Church and Julianna Layne Young, as Claire in different versions of memory and reality, give the daughter’s return a shifting emotional weight.
What makes Safe House most compelling is the distinction it draws between protection and control. Rock believes he is protecting his family from a dangerous world, but every measure he takes to secure that protection gives him more control over the people inside. His fear has become architecture. His politics, his illness, his relationship with his father, and his determination to keep danger outside all feed the same impulse to build walls and decide who gets to move within them. The play does not offer an easy answer for what fear does to a family when it becomes wrapped up in love, loyalty, history, and the need to keep everyone safe.
The unfinished basement therefore becomes more than the setting. Rock has built walls because he believes those walls will save his family, yet the people he is trying to save are the ones increasingly unable to breathe, speak, disagree, leave, or simply be themselves. The danger he is preparing for is outside the house. The people he is trying to protect are already trapped inside it.
