Unfortunately, to 40 or 50 years.

Nagle Jackson's new dysfunctional-family dark comedy at first seems a retread of This Day and Age, his congenial play about adult children seeking asylum with their parents—especially since Penelope Reed and Doug Wild played the elders in both.

This time, the kids literally seek protection: daughter Cat (Jennifer Schelter) works for a Washington think tank but inexplicably shoplifted and is now on the lam, while son Jake (Chris Heuisler) avoids G-men because he blows things up.

Ingrid and Barney—even the names grate with artificiality—purchased a "McMansion" in a gated suburban cul-de-sac. Each room's decor is ordered by catalog, but we're spared seeing the "Renoir Bedroom" and the "Sausolito Redwood Deck" because the brood retreats to the pegboard-walled basement family room to pedal a stationary bike, learn languages from tapes, and complain.

Cat, Ingrid and Barney, Jake lectures, are addicted to consumerism. "What if I broke the system?" Cat wonders about her betrayal of capitalism, yet she refuses to return home to face the law or her husband. "How will we pay the mortgage?" Ingrid and Barney fret. "What if our friends find out?" Does any of this matter?

Jackson, who also directed, has Jake emerge from the audience as an anarchist jester; imagine Evita's Che Guevara as a wisecracking, hyperactive punk who can't sing. He rants about consumerism, cell phones and American life's meaninglessness—"In size we trust," he sneers—but responds by sucking from his parents' dwindling wealth, running from the girl whose family bliss intimidates him and making things go boom.

After Cat—the only remotely likable character, thanks to Schelter's genuine performance—realizes that Americans "are the adolescents of the world," Jake provides a deus ex machina that apparently restores the family's wealth, negating whatever these hollow characters might learn when reality finally flushes them from their basement. In 1958, this might have passed for irony.

Hedgerow's new play festival also includes three staged readings of new scripts: Hal & Co. by Phyllis Purscell on March 27, Banner by Kathleen Clark on April 10, and Deborah Brevoort's King Island Christmas on April 17, plus a production of local playwright Walt Vail's Betsy's Flag May 27 to June 18.