Breaking the Story

Second Stage's Breaking the Story (closing today) has a lot of goals for its 85 minutes: depict the PTSD of a war journalist, discuss the meaning and ethics of journalism, show a woman trying to turn away from what she wants most, and explore the effect on her family of the journalist's constant absences and seeming attraction to danger. It succeeds to some extent with all of these goals, but the play has a certain hollowness. The characters are bundles of traits that don't quite cohere, so it is hard to be totally invested in their lives and stories. 

It doesn't help that Time Stands Still, written by Donald Margulies and starring Laura Linney, covers similar territory and is so much better. I have a more emotional response to Time Stands Still 14 years after seeing it than I had at any point during Breaking the Story. I don't think it's completely fair to judge a play in the light of a previous work, but sometimes you just can't help it.

Wendy Caster

Orpheus Descending

Tennessee Williams’s play Orpheus Descending (recently at the Theatre for a New Audience) was the first of his works to be produced. While it is not one of his masterpieces, it is still rich, sad, funny, fascinating, and compellingly overwrought.

As described on TFANA’s website, the play “tells the story of the passion of two outcasts—Lady Torrance, a storekeeper’s wife and daughter of a murdered Sicilian bootlegger, and Val, a wandering guitar player—and their attempt to escape from a Southern Hell.”

Lady (the excellent Maggie Siff) and Val (Pico Alexander) must negotiate dealings with a wide variety of townspeople: Maggie’s husband, deathly ill but still quite powerful and mean; Carol Cutere, a needy young woman with little chance of ever getting her needs met; Vee Talbott (the wonderful Ana Reeder), who turns her religious visions into paintings; and her husband, the sheriff, who operates in a much more concrete–and dangerous–manner. There are also the town gossips, Maggie’s husband’s nurse, and others. 

Lady and Val exist in a different world than the rest of the town, and they inevitably get involved, despite the dangers of doing so. They talk and actually listen to each other, they understand each other, and they are deeply drawn to each other physically. Most importantly, they find hope in each other.

Erica Schmidt’s direction of the TFANA production left much to be desired in terms of clarify and use of space. The cast was uneven. Maggie Siff had the presence and skill necessary to ground the play in the underpinning of reality that it needs. Pico Alexander lacked the animal magnetism required by his role, which threw off the balance of the play. But all in all, the TFANA production was vibrant and alive.

Wendy Caster