No, you can't go home again . . . . and are you sure you wanted to?

Set at the end of World War II, and written in 1964 at the beginning of a sea change in Americans’ view of themselves and the world, “The Subject Was Roses” takes a scalpel to one family’s precarious calm, revealing the simmering dysfunction beneath.

Frank Gilroy’s play is receiving a new production at George Street Playhouse, starring Stephanie Zimbalist, Lee Sellars and Chris Wendelken.

As the play opens, the long-suffering Nettie, played with grim endurance by Zimbalist, wordlessly sets about her morning chores. Even when she is joined in the kitchen by her husband John, there is only perfunctory conversation about household logistics. They become animated only when discussing their son, Timmy, who has just returned from a three-year stint fighting the Germans.

As they bicker about the much-changed young man who has returned from Europe in place of the boy who left, it becomes apparent that when Timmy enlisted, he took with him the last bits of glue that bound this family together. All that remains between Nettie and John are old habits and routines.

 

But for Timmy, everything is changed. His old clothes are now ill-fitting; he doesn’t like the same foods, or even take his coffee in the same way. At first, his adoring mother is devastated by the changes she sees in him, while his father, long distant and dismissive, now finds him transformed into the son he’d always longed for.

 

Timmy is flattered by his father’s attention. But as the men bond over ball games and beers, Timmy, for the first time, understands that there is an uncrossable chasm between his parents and impulsively tries to fix 25 years of anger and eroding trust with a bunch of red roses.

Zimbalist, whom audiences will remember as the brains behind Pierce Brosnan in the 1980s television series “Remington Steele,” projects the ineffable sadness of someone whose life has not gone as she expected it to. Trapped in a loveless marriage by circumstances, forced to ask her husband every time she needs a few dollars for groceries, she is imprisoned by the limited choices available to women in the late ‘40s, and has invested in her son all of the hopes and dreams she once had for herself. There is a grim stoicism to her performance, a slight downturn to her mouth that signals a depression deep, wide and long-term. In Nettie’s small, subtle gestures, Zimbalist depicts a woman who is barely clinging to an image of herself that only she can see.

Of particular note is Wendelken, who makes young Timmy’s re-entry into a complicated set of family dynamics, and the associated revelations about his parent’s marriage, both compelling and convincing. Returning after three years at war to the apartment in which he grew up, Timmy is at once seduced by his parents’ willingness to indulge him and repelled by the outdated image of him to which they cling. Slowly it dawns on him that no matter what collateral damage there will be, he must move away, move forward, move on.

As John, the working class man who married above his station and has been punishing his wife for that fact ever since, Sellars is all bluster and rage. He a bully, both emotionally and physically, repelled by his sensitive son and ultimately also disappointed by the young man, with his own mind and opinions, who comes home from war.

The production designers have carefully constructed a world 60 years gone with particular attention to period details. Which is why the suits that John wears, more appropriate to 1970s Brooklyn than 1940s Chicago, are so very jarring.

In some ways, “The Subject Was Roses” is unavoidably dated. Written just as the ‘60s were taking hold of the country, it delves into difficult subject matter but, ultimately, clings to a vision of family life in which parents do what’s best for children; children, even those who’ve had difficult childhoods, find their ways; and happy endings are still a possibility. But this production is well-acted and affecting, even for audiences of 2011, who know, or at least suspect, that there is no such thing as a happy ending.