Theater: Samuel J. Friedman Theatre / 261 West 47th Street, New York, NY, 10036
Synopsis:
Award-winning actress Laura Linney returns to Broadway in the American premiere of a haunting new solo play adapted by Rona Munro from the bestselling novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout. A sold-out sensation originally produced by the London Theatre Company at the Bridge Theatre in London, Ms. Linney was hailed as “luminous” by the The New York Times, “genuinely phenomenal” by Time Out London, and the play was called “deeply affecting and heartbreaking” by The Guardian.
Linney plays Lucy Barton, a woman who wakes after an operation to find – much to her surprise – her mother at the foot of her bed. They haven’t seen each other in years. During their days-long visit, Lucy tries to understand her past, works to come to terms with her family, and begins to find herself as a writer. This spellbinding story is directed by five-time Olivier Award winner Richard Eyre.
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January 15, 2020: The title character of “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” Rona Munro’s crystalline stage adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel, is hardly a woman of mystery. On the contrary, as embodied with middle-American forthrightness by a perfectly cast Laura Linney, in the production that opened Wednesday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Lucy may be the most translucent figure now on a New York stage.
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January 15, 2020: Laura Linney pours the breath of life into Broadway’s My Name Is Lucy Barton, based on the novel by Olive Kitteridge author Elizabeth Strout. Arriving in New York following an acclaimed London production, this poignant, 90-minute solo play, directed by Richard Eyre and opening tonight at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, conjures up an entire life – or two or three – through the sometimes fuzzy, always penetrating memories of a middle-aged woman still coming to terms with a childhood few would wish to recall.
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January 15, 2020: Like the spare but elegant novel by Elizabeth Strout (“Olive Kitteridge”), on which Rona Munro (“The James Trilogy”) based this theatrical treatment, the dynamic is the elementary, fraught relationship between mothers and daughters. Here, the situation is not the expected one between a mother on her deathbed and a daughter struggling to affirm the nature of their relationship before their inevitable final parting. In this case, it’s the daughter who lies on the hospital bed and the long-estranged mother who comes to visit. Linney slips effortlessly from the harridan mother to the wounded daughter, strong characters both, dispensing with the usual folderol of switching off costume pieces or twisting herself into physical contortions. It’s all in the voice, the voice, the voice, and it’s beautifully done.
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January 15, 2020: Linney's emotional transparency is wondrous as she relates the different ways in which mother and daughter reach out to one another for forgiveness without ever saying the words, each of them revealing a difficult admiration for the other that's almost like love. Equally extraordinary is Linney's ability to speak with warmth, immediacy and the grounded wisdom of hindsight while simultaneously inhabiting a precarious moment from many years before. Embodying both the reinvented Lucy and the more fragile versions of her childhood and earlier adult years, she fills the stage, making this delicate memory piece resonate with the soaring vitality of a fully lived-in present.
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January 15, 2020: Linney comes most alive when she’s inhabiting Lucy’s mother, pushing her voice into a nasal Midwestern bark and delivering juicy storytelling monologues. It’s when she is narrating the story as Lucy that the play runs into trouble. Writing and reading are solitary events; public performance is not, and the literary qualities of the text, though often lovely, prove an obstacle: The very fine Linney works hard to suggest an interior struggle behind the smooth, polished reticence of the words—at several points, she verges on tears—yet it is hard to shake the sense that Lucy is writing for us, not speaking to us.
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