“The Loman Family Picnic” at 12 Miles West Theatre Company

Alternating between fantasy and reality, this acerbic black comedy, from the Pulitzer prize-winning playwright of Dinner With Friends and this Broadway season’s returning Sight Unseen, offers a comic, but stinging, assessment of the American dream. Herbie, Doris and their sons Stewie and Mitchell are a middle-class Jewish family living in Coney Island struggling to put up a good front even though continually short of cash. The tensions burst forth when Herbie seizes his son’s bar mitzvah money and storms out of their home. When—and if—Herbie will return home is the question facing his family.