Looking out on a picture-perfect Manhattan cityscape dominated by the glimmering Chrysler Building from a high-up private room at the hospital where she is ensconced following a routine appendectomy that develops into a nine-week mystery illness, a sophisticated and altogether together New York writer introduces herself: “My name is Lucy Barton.” But things are not what they seem. Small things, big things, all things.
This applies not only to the character, essayed by the altogether wonderful Laura Linney, and the play (adapted by Rona Munro from the 2016 bestseller by Pulitzer-winner Elizabeth Strout, directed by Ronald Eyre for Nicholas Hytner’s London Theatre Company and brought to New York audiences by Manhattan Theatre Club). It applies to the concept and even the setting, a bare rectangle occupied solely by a chair, a hospital bed, a side table with an untouched pitcher of water, and Linney. Plus that postcard-perfect window view of Manhattan spires, projected on one of three upstage screens. It’s not much of a production from ever-inventive designer Bob Crowley, you might think, especially given the rows of patron-filled seats occupying what would be the wings. But things are not what they seem, and Linney and her unseen cohort manage to fill the stage and fill the theater altogether nicely, thank you very much.
“Nicely” is not a random description, mind you; it’s the name of a family of childhood neighbors who are discussed in depth, and needless to say the self-proclaimed “pretty Nicely girls” were not all that nice. Although who’s to say given the bias of the anecdote teller, Lucy’s estranged Midwestern mother. And don’t you think of calling the lady “trash”; she’ll cut you dead, and this is a hardscrabble, dirt-poor drab who specializes in demeaningly withering maternal wisdom. “Wizzle,” she repeatedly calls her daughter, with a sardonic edge.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★ review here.]
Mother—whom, unless I missed it, appears to be nameless—makes an abrupt, surprise appearance beside the hospital bed, having been exiled from Lucy’s cosmopolitan life many years back. This occurs something like ten minutes in, and Mother proceeds to more or less commandeer the play and explode the reality of her daughter-the-writer’s carefully and painfully earned existence. And her self-worth, too.
Much of this fractured memory play centers around Mother’s five-night hospital-room visit. Linney inhabits both roles, with the parent’s Midwestern-pioneer twang threatening to efface the mild-mannered daughter. Which, as it turns out, is part of what long ago drove Lucy away from the fictional hamlet of Amgash, Illinois. (The majestic Chrysler Building skyscape is replaced, in our view and in Lucy’s imagination, by the corn and soybean fields of her youth as well as a startlingly claustrophobic representation of a key childhood trauma. These courtesy of video designer Luke Halls, who will return to Broadway in March with his remarkable work on The Lehman Trilogy.)
As the ravels of the story are unspooled, Lucy reveals a surprising—to us and to herself—forgiveness of Mother’s passive acceptance of the girl’s severe abuse at the hands of her violent and troubled father. This is not addressed explicitly by Lucy, and presumably wasn’t by novelist Strout, but it is central to the play. “I kept wishing she would say your father hopes you get better,” Lucy says at one point from her hospital bed. “But she did not.”
Things are not what they seem, no. Ultimately, Lucy confesses almost apologetically to an abiding love for her decidedly difficult mother; despite the hardships, this is the only mother she knew. Even though the adult Lucy Barton has otherwise erased from her life all vestiges of her upbringing, beginning with that thick-as-a-backhoe native twang.
Transforming My Name Is Lucy Barton from page to stage in such engrossing manner is quite a feat on the part of the actor, as well as Strout, Munro, and Eyre. Linney gives an astounding performance, circling the truth (whatever that might be) with a supreme ambivalence. The overall effect, on that almost bare platform set within the stage of the Friedman, being that she—the actress and the character—is thoroughly, and nicely, compelling.
My Name Is Lucy Barton opened January 15, 2020, at Samuel J. Friedman Theatre and runs through February 29. Tickets and information: manhattantheatreclub.com
