The floorplan that Shmuel Hasfari has laid out for The Master of the House, receiving its American premiere through April 29 at the Laguna Playhouse in Orange County, California) covers a lot of ground. Set in Tel Aviv, where its premiere would earn the 2003 Israel Theatre Academy Award for Best Play, it touches on Israel’s history from its 20th Century resurrection to the daily threats to destroy it.    

The international politics are merely background for a smaller portrait with more universal resonance. One couple, whose problems will trace in part to political unrest, is at a crossroads from which views of aging, marriage, the safety of our children, and the sanity of our parents can be explored. While Richard Stein’s staging does not show the script, translated from Hebrew by Anthony Berris, successfully balancing the relative weight of its storylines and themes, one senses a potential for greater power hidden between the lines.   

The principal metaphor in The Master of the House is renovation. How to balance the conflicting needs for renewal and for retaining links to the past is the question that underlies all the action and relationships here. This reflects back on the state of Israel, where age-old traditions are in pitched battle with changing realities, but it’s the fragile truce between husband and wife Yoel (Jonathan Goldstein) and Nava (Stacie Chaiken) that is at the center of The Master of the House.

One of the ironies suggested by the play’s title is this concept of a household having a person in charge. Who is in charge of Yoel and Nava’s home seems clear at the beginning, but is then up for grabs and ultimately decided under new terms. As is common in many households, these adults are only saying part of what’s on their minds. Yoel does this because he’s completely stopped up as a person. Nava does it because his blockage gives her nowhere to go.     

That passive-aggressive standoff results in exchanges that sound like drive-by shootings, passing without revealing much. They make the play’s action seem more circular than it may in fact be. If Hasfari’s multi-level story is going to succeed, as it apparently did in Tel Aviv, it requires the director and central actors to find an underlying logic to drive these two scattered personalities from curtain to curtain call. Here, where it should feel heartbreakingly real, it merely feels broken.   

Goldstein’s Yoel is a scruffy columnist living in the same house he grew up in. He writes about nostalgia and architecture, which reflect his own reverence for old buildings on one hand and his clinging to the past on the other. He hides his retentiveness in a transparent reverence for his father, portrayed as a great builder of early Tel Aviv (a portrait that is later undercut). Creating a retreating personality is a tough assignment for an actor: he is the thing he is not. Not surprisingly, it’s Yoel’s moments outside himself — lost in nostalgia or lightened by drink — in which Goldstein successfully shows some of who this man might have been.