If a play goes up at La MaMa, chances are it’s experimental or at least unconventional. That’s true of Alec Duffy’s production of Family, a 2014 play by Celine Song that debuted in a Brooklyn apartment. It’s far from the Song we’ve gotten to know in the films Past Lives and Materialists. “Family courts disgust and other dark emotions as it pries up the floorboards of this family’s history,” the journalist Rhoda Feng wrote in 2024 in The New York Times. “This play wants to offend, to disturb, to create an ash heap out of your expectations.” It’s about three unemployed half-siblings who come together to mourn their father in the house he built. They’re also there to fight over what exists underneath it. A past riddled with mysterious accidents and sexual abuse is revealed, things take a surreal turn, and the house comes to seem occupied by forces supernatural and controlling. —Jeanne Malle