Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – MTC’s winter season gives us two personal, beautifully-acted portraits of unmoored, headstrong lives

• By drediman
• February 13, 2016
• No Comments

This winter, Manhattan Theatre Club is offering audiences a pair of compelling, albeit flawed, plays from two of our most respected playwrights. What these plays have in common is that they each present a complicated, unsettled, yet ultimately sympathetic portrait of an unmoored yet headstrong character – one at the end of their life, the other at the beginning. The first of these plays is Richard Greenberg’s Our Mother’s Brief Affair, which stars the wonderful Linda Lavin at the top of her game as an elderly woman with a surprising secret to share with her concerned children. The second is John Patrick Shanley’s Prodigal Son, which stars a remarkable young actor named Timothée Chalamet as a precocious yet highly unstable blue collar high schooler from the Bronx struggling to make sense of his place in the world, let alone his fancy New England boarding school.

Richard Greenberg’s Our Mother’s Brief Affair I (RECOMMENDED), which is currently playing at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on Broadway, is perhaps the better written of the two plays. The fiercely intelligent Mr. Greenberg here gives us a beautifully structured play that subtly moves back and forth in time and space – often times seamlessly within a single scene. If the play lacks the intellectual and visceral excitement of his previous work (among them, the memorable Take Me Out, The Violet Hour, and The Dazzle), Our Mother’s Brief Affair is perhaps among his most plaintive and personal plays. The deliciously acerbic Linda Lavin has always played sharp, witty broads onstage. It’s therefore refreshing to see her here play a woman who’s defining traits are her debilitating guilt and vulnerability beneath the veneer. The rest of the cast is equally superb: Kate Arrington, Greg Keller, and John Procaccino all act with the precision and intensity needed to make Mr. Greenberg’s script sing. The production, which is simply and stylishly designed by veteran Santo Loquasto, is helmed by Manhattan Theatre Club’s artistic director Lynne Meadow, who directs the play with a piercingly objective eye.

John Patrick Shanley’s Prodigal Son (RECOMMENDED) opened last week at City Center in an Off-Broadway production that’s sensitively directed by the playwright himself. Although Mr. Shanley’s latest doesn’t break new ground in this somewhat predictable play, it’s certainly among his most personal, as Our Mother’s Brief Affair is to Mr. Greenberg. In this loosely autobiographical play, the astonishing actor Timothée Chalamet plays an incarnation of a younger Mr. Shanley as a brilliant lost soul in high school. It’s thanks to Mr. Chalamet’s thrilling performance, that’s in turn self-possessed and unhinged, that Prodigal Son makes the emotional impact that it does. As his boarding school teachers, Robert Sean Leonard and Chris McGarry are also excellent (it’s fun to see Mr. Leonard in this role after being on the other side of the desk years ago in flicks like Dead Poets Society). Like Our Mother’s Brief Affair, Prodigal Son is elegantly designed by the busy Santo Loquasto.

OUR MOTHER’S BRIEF AFFAIR
Broadway, Play
Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
2 hours (without an intermission)
Through March 6

PRODIGAL SON
Off-Broadway, Play
Manhattan Theatre Club at NY City Center (Stage I)
1 hour, 35 minutes (without an intermission)
Through March 27