Nice set! It’s a sizable modern restaurant with a big front window (over to the stage-left side), and we find out it’s an Indian restaurant — curry and “Oh! My goodness! Indian, not feathers and Blankets Indian! — and it’s in Cleveland in 2010. Deserted. “Closed!” sign. But a raffish looking black guy with a limp comes in the open door anyway and startles the man in a suit who’s straightening things up, and keeps asking him for something to eat, even though the man keeps telling him that they’re closed and he should go away. Turns out that the restaurant in The Lake Effect is out-of-business closed, and the man straightening up, Vijay, is the son of the owner, who’s sick and sleeping upstairs. Maybe just to keep us interested and amuse us, the playwright has the black visitor, Bernard, tell Vijay that he doesn’t believe him, that the old man whose restaurant this is, isn’t sick and never sleeps at this time of day. And for most of the play Bernard keeps telling Vijay that he is Vijay’s father’s best friend who places bets on horse-races with the old man’s money that his son didn’t know he had. Furthermore, Bernard has never heard of Vijay or that the old man had a son. Finally, Bernard goes away but says that he’ll be back. So then we get Priya, Vijay’s sister, come in and argue with him and reveal that neither one has been in contact with the other for a while or knows anything about what the other has been doing. Bernard comes back. And we find out slowly that the father has just died, the son and daughter have competing claims to his money, he’s actually left a will leaving the property and restaurant business and all his saved money to Bernard; and that he’d saved Bernard’s life when he found Bernard lying bleeding in the street with his head bashed in; and Bernard has resulting brain damage. There’s comedy as well as mystery in all these unexpected revelations, and the later surprises revealing that the old man bashed in Bernard’s head with a brick because he thought he was the black guy that Priya married, was hurt by, ran away from, and has now reunited with. He devoted himself to the damaged black man because of guilt. But, like this account of it, the play gets tedious working out this odd plot that leaves a good deal to question about its significance other than that oddness. There’s a warm-hearted resolution as the three get chummy and find something to eat in the empty restaurant. But there’s a nagging overall question of “So What?” after all this contrivance. Pirronne Yousefzadeh’s direction is well-paced and drily funny when it can be. David Arsenault’s detailed, atmospheric set is pleasing and effective, with Seth Reiser’s very complete lighting design subtly underscoring the changes in tone and mood. And the three actors — especially the effortlessly commanding Clinton Lowe as Bernard — are entirely effective. But unlike our irresistible lake effects this winter, this play’s whole activity seems more a clever construct than an inevitable force of nature.
