| A theatrical adaptation of Strout's luminous trauma narrative that's barely reworked for the stage. Too often here, the audience is being read a story rather than told one. Linney is technically impressive, but she can't find the emotional depths in a story that resounds mostly in a reader's imagination and/or identifications and must, on stage, move fast. Strout's language is spare, plain even, but nonetheless literary. Here it frequently sounds stilted--the speech is notably contractionless-- as Linney rushes from one recollection to the next. In the book, Barton's childhood terrors yield, ultimately, to the kind of radiant grace that unblinking memory and acceptance can bring. Linney, for whom radiance comes easy, is ahead of the story; you don't feel she's arrived somewhere she wasn't before. Strout's lissome book has been preserved, but not transformed. |
