Theater

Here’s a line that would never occur to Amy Freed: “You can’t go home again.” Freed insists that her characters must go home again, and in “Freedomland,” her brazen new play, she sends three grown-up siblings back to the homestead for a face-off in which no long-standing hostility is left unspoken. “You have a narcissistic personality disorder. I looked it up!” one sister excitedly informs the other. “You’re the freak!”

Freed has a striking comic voice that is dark but exhilarating and honest. In “Freedomland,” which opened Friday at South Coast Repertory, she strays occasionally into that sitcom nether world in which characters disappear inside a weird joke mill that has no reason for being other than its own perpetuity. But when she’s good, she’s writing for keeps.

Akin to the brittle, neurotic milieu of Nicky Silver, “Freedomland” gives us a gaggle of memorable characters. Sig (Heather Ehlers) is an especially delicious and improbable creation--she’s a successful young painter whose subject is forlorn clowns. In Ehlers’ smart performance, Sig is too hip to love Walter Keene and Norman Rockwell without irony, but she does. She insists, in some postmodernist aversion to introspection, that her art has no buried messages. “We’re all lonely clowns after all,” she tells an interviewer, straight-faced.

Titus (Maury Ginsberg), the art journalist Sig invites home with her, finds Sig’s clowns to be sinister. He believes, perhaps like the playwright, that “sentimentality is a form of murderous aggression.” He looks like he’s stuck a finger in a socket, surprising his hair while the rest of him remains cool. He has large, injured eyes that will appeal, simultaneously, to Sig’s sister Polly (Annie LaRussa) as well as to her ravenous stepmother, Claude (Karen Kondazian), a therapist whose belief in the therapeutic effect of orgasm has “transformed my work with my patients.”

Sig’s clowns may garner her a salary in the six figures, but they are an object of derision to her family, all of whom have gathered, for barely any reason, at Dad’s upstate New York home, which is full of books and religious artifacts (well designed by Michael C. Smith). Polly, a bedraggled perennial thesis writer, calls Sig “Dr. Clownenstein” and dances around her making circus-music sounds. Noah (Peter Michael Goetz), the spacey dad, a casualty of the structureless ‘60s, doesn’t “get” her. Even more dismissive is Sig’s brother Seth (Simon Billig), a violent-tempered mountain man who lives in a shack with his pregnant wife, Lori (Erin J. O’Brien), a devoted lover of “The Hobbit.”

While these details may sound like tacked-on eccentricities, they are not. Director David Emmes understands that the actors must wholly invest in their eccentricities, and the cast members play off one another beautifully. Freed’s comic exaggerations are the engine for a family showdown that is as recognizable as it is fresh. Particularly, the power struggle between the sisters--one successful, one not--is a ripping, primal competition, leavened by breathtaking anger on both sides.

In a wonderfully funny performance by LaRussa, Polly seesaws between impotence and feral aggression toward her sister. She can’t finish her thesis (called “Simile as Metaphor”) about the women in “The Iliad,” and she has had to take the humiliating job of being Sig’s assistant. Polly’s panicked self-doubt can cause her to lose the ability to breathe. But she comes alive as art critic; she sees pathology all over Sig’s clowns and tells her quite maliciously: “You think the world is full of phony people pretending to feel things to confuse you, so you give the world back these clowns.” She goes on to compare her sister to John Wayne Gacy.

Freed has a big, vibrant vision and a determination to force subtext into the main arena. She manages this with voracious humor and a gift for antic detail. Her problem, at least in “Freedomland,” is that her method leaves her with nothing under the surface. She substitutes a tonal shift in the second act for subtext, but the tone change isn’t integrated well enough. When the siblings join together in a late-breaking catharsis, triggered by the memory of a childhood trip to the eponymous theme park, you may feel stranded with too many unanswered questions instead of the desired feeling of release.

“Freedomland” may be flawed and unfinished, but it is utterly worth seeing. Freed has a distinctive voice, but more than that, she shows a hunger for drama and a divine spark of wit.

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“Freedomland,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7:30 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 2:30 p.m. Ends Nov. 17. $28-$42. (714) 708-5555. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.

Heather Ehlers: Sig

Annie LaRussa: Polly

Simon Billig: Seth

Peter Michael Goetz: Noah

Karen Kondazian: Claude

Maury Ginsberg: Titus

Erin J. O’Brien: Lori

A South Coast Repertory production. By Amy Freed. Directed by David Emmes. Sets Michael C. Smith. Costumes Susan Denison Geller. Lights Peter Maradudin. Sound B.C. Keller. Production manager Michael Mora. Stage manager Scott Harrison.