THEATER REVIEW : This ‘Home’ Is All About Feelings

Casey Kurtti’s liberal guilt drama “Three Ways Home” at the Hudson Backstage serves as a decent vehicle for the acting talents of Charmaine Alicia Mancil, and to a lesser extent Brian Anthony and Patricia Lynch. But the play itself is only slouching toward credibility.

This full-lengther begging to be a one-act received a strong 1989 staging at LATC, and this cast follows that tough act ably. Yet there’s only so much actors can do with a play about a yuppie volunteer who befriends a welfare mother and her teen-age son.

The three characters speak mostly in direct address to the audience, rather than to one another. Not surprisingly then, most of what they tell us has to do with their “ feelings . . . nothing more than feelings. “ Barry Manilow notwithstanding, it gets old quickly.

What bleeds through the attenuated plot and its several false endings is the sense of a playwright desperately seeking do-gooder validation. And director Nancy Oehlschlaeger hasn’t done much to mitigate this impression.