Family connections, divisions in Zinn’s ‘Venus’

Now, though, Zinn the younger has restored the original script (while maintaining a few of the edits that, he says, smoothed the action), and it’s remarkable how much better “Daughter of Venus’’ works in this form. In Jeff Zinn’s fluid, naturalistic staging at WHAT (on an evocatively academic-homey set by Ji-Youn Chang), the play comes across as a quick-witted and emotionally complex study of a family, and a world, in crisis. For admirers of Howard Zinn’s passionate politics, and indeed for anyone interested in art that engages with the political world, it’s worth the trip to Wellfleet.

“Daughter of Venus’’ conjures up the nuclear family of a nuclear physicist. Paolo Matteotti was involved with the early tests of atomic devices at Los Alamos, N.M., until he decided that even his nonmilitary work — testing the radiation levels to determine safety — was immoral because it helped the government keep developing nuclear weapons. His misgivings were only compounded when his son, Jamie, was born with possibly related neurological issues, exacerbating the tensions between Paolo and his wife, Lucy, over his work.

All this is back story, though. Now Jamie is a young adult, as is his sister, Aramintha. The play opens with her return from Guatemala, filled with political fire — and fury at her father, because her mother has tried to kill herself and is in a psychiatric hospital. Into this fraught scene enters John Lendl, a former colleague of Paolo who now works for the Rand Corp. and wants to lure Paolo back into arms-related research.

“Daughter of Venus’’ is still not a perfect play. It has talky stretches, moments when the characters are too overtly lecturing the audience rather than living in the story. And Lendl fits awkwardly into the action. But Jeff Zinn glides over these rough spots as best he can, and he has helped himself immeasurably by casting actors who can make just about anything fly.