TimeOut Review of Time and the Conways
Adam Feldman
J.B. Priestley’s 1937 drama is about time, and its current Broadway revival, if nothing else, makes you aware of time passing. Formally inventive when it premiered, the play begins in the home of a large and well-off British family in 1919; it then skips forward to show us the same group, much the worse for wear, 18 years later—though the characters, inexplicably, are 19 years older—before returning us to 1919. There are a few minutes of philosophy about the slippery nature of time itself, but otherwise Time and the Conways has three discrete parts. Act I is all naive drawing-room frippery, with characters rushing about in fluffy fake mustaches for an offstage game of charahdes. Act II is all bitter internecine sniping; Act III is a half-hour exercise in heavy dramatic irony. (A girl who will die talks of how she will live; people whose hearts will break predict how happy they will surely be.)
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