Threaded Order Chronological Order
| PEACE FOR MARY FRANCES Friday Night | |
| Posted by: sergius 07:14 pm EDT 05/27/18 | |
|
|
|
| Documentary theatre. It's too long and far too slow but so is dying sometimes which is, perhaps, partly the point of this play about a woman in at home hospice care. Verisimilitude without imagination or poetry can be tedious. Thorne, a young playwright, seems eager to get the details right, but she hasn't been able to transform quotidian experience into something compelling. Worse, the family she's writing about is consumed by varieties of depthless depression which just adds to the alienation; everyone here is unselfconsciously miserable. Lois Smith, however, is some kind of wonder and to the extent that the play aims to be feelingful about what it's like--and what it means--to, paradoxically, rage against and welcome the dying of the light, she provides it. But otherwise the play is stalled from the start. | |
| reply to this message |
| re: PEACE FOR MARY FRANCES Friday Night | |
| Posted by: Delvino 09:27 am EDT 05/28/18 | |
| In reply to: PEACE FOR MARY FRANCES Friday Night - sergius 07:14 pm EDT 05/27/18 | |
|
|
|
| A flavor of photorealism is a new emphasis in playwriting. It can be remarkably clarifying and dramatically sharp when used sparingly, as in Herzog's economical "Mary Jane," which managed to tell a young mother's entire medical crisis story in under 90 minutes, the quotidian reality of in-home care and a sudden shift to a hospital stunning complemented by a production's style. Kaufman managed to be razor-sharp in getting medical details right, while adding an almost poetic dimension in the use of an expanding physical playing area. A woman and unseen disabled child locked in a claustrophobic apartment, hugging the downstage 4th wall, confronted the threatening world as the set seemed to rip wide open. It was theatrical magic tethered to painstaking trajectory of incremental loss. Sometimes, a director can take a documentary text and expand its reach. It sounds like the opposite is true here. | |
| reply to this message |
| re: PEACE FOR MARY FRANCES Friday Night | |
| Posted by: summertheater 09:26 pm EDT 05/27/18 | |
| In reply to: PEACE FOR MARY FRANCES Friday Night - sergius 07:14 pm EDT 05/27/18 | |
|
|
|
| Lois Smith is as always excellent but if someone had cut the show to a more manageable 2 hours, it'd have been a far stronger show. Still glad I saw it, but got quite tedious at times. A great show is somewhere in the muddled mess. | |
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
Time to render: 0.010272 seconds.