bathos

Open Roads, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake and Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden take on the emotional depths of family life in ways that shred the heartstrings — mostly without slipping into bathos.

Yet even as Winocour piles on too many complications, she retains an appreciable astringency — call it a sense of emotional realism about what it means to actually survive — that keeps bathos at bay.

It is what Alexander Pope would call bathos.

The grid — a modernist pictorial device that she deploys with postmodernist bathos — is rendered in wonky, spray-painted lines or a loose pink and brown checkerboard.

Through sheer allure, the actress turns a character largely superfluous to the already jumbled story into the production’s most valuable, displaying the irresistibility of earnest hope in a work that too often dips into its bathos.