Review: ‘This Day Forward,’ a Weird Wedding Night and What Comes After
Ben BrantleyNovember 21, 2016: Nicky Silver is driving with the brakes on in “This Day Forward,” his bumpy and tentative new comedy, which opened on Monday night at the Vineyard Theater. Usually, for better or worse, this mordant playwright can be relied on to go tearing through the barricades of good taste, good manners and sane plotting into his own ecstatic no man’s land of misery. Yet fans of Mr. Silver’s angry wit and whimsy may feel he is missing in action in this portrait of a misbegotten marriage. True, the show has been staged at the Vineyard, Mr. Silver’s longtime creative incubator. The production has been directed with as much smoothness as the script allows by his frequent and fruitful collaborator, Mark Brokaw. And it features themes — monster mothers, emotionally crippled children, love that dies aborning — that have always been dear to Mr. Silver’s darkly sentimental heart. Nonetheless, if I had started watching this play with no foreknowledge and no program, I’m not sure I would have been able to identify it as his work. Though it has been mounted with elaborate care, with a polished cast and fully detailed sets (Allen Moyer) and costumes (Kaye Voyce), “This Day Forward” feels unfulfilled, like a skeleton in search of animating flesh.
READ THE REVIEW