'Blood From a Stone' both brutal and sweet

Whenever it rains, big chunks of the ceiling crash into the mess of a kitchen. The husband smashes his loathed wife around and drives his car into the porch. One son vomits in the garbage, another has sex behind the sofa with the wife of the drug pusher from next door. And everyone in the family hollers - a lot.

How bizarre that, despite the brutality and unhappiness onstage at The New Group for more than two and a half hours, it's the sweetness I remember about "Blood From a Stone."

A first play by late-bloomer Tommy Nohilly, 42, a former Marine who worked as an NYU security guard for 17 years, the overlong and unwieldy comedy-drama (his reworked graduate thesis at Columbia) has a tenderness that binds the miserable working-class Connecticut family with an unpredictable, attenuated pull of affection.

So, yes, this feels both like a Sam Shepard play with a soft belly, and a really tough episode of "Roseanne." But it's also easy to understand why director Scott Elliott has bothered to wrestle with the script for at least the past two years, and how six first-rate actors find much in the characters beyond easy absurdity and rage.

In the center is the steadying force of the ever-surprising Ethan Hawke. The actor, whose odd, dangerous impulses have become one of the bracing pleasures of New York theater, slips unexpectedly into the skin of the "good" older son. Stopping at his blue-collar town before heading to the open road, the guy - despite the slacker wanderlust and the pills - reluctantly becomes almost a moral force in the primal chaos of his family.

Ann Dowd has a touching, blind affection as the mother, and Gordon Clapp keeps revealing hidden resources as her miserable husband. Thomas Guiry makes deft use of his angelic looks as the devious brother, Natasha Lyonne is radiantly believable as the overworked sister and Daphne Rubin-Vega, as the neighbor, briefly lights up the gloom like an electric sex toy.

The play can't decide whether to be naturalistic or a cartoon, and abandons plot points as recklessly as these people trash their lives. But there is something to be said for heart and, for all the clumsiness, Nohilly says it well.