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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for January 22, 2016

Sleeping with the enemy

January 22, 2016 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the Broadway premiere of Richard Greenberg’s Our Mother’s Brief Affair. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

I didn’t have high hopes for “Our Mother’s Brief Affair,” a four-hander about Anna (Linda Lavin), a woman on the brink of senility who confesses to Seth and Abby (Greg Keller and Kate Arrington), her gay twin children, that she once had an extra-marital affair with a man (John Procaccino) who wasn’t what, or whom, he seemed to be. That’s not an unpromising set-up, but to write about it in a superficial way is a recipe for mediocrity. Only Mr. Greenberg, to my surprise, has engaged with his material in an unequivocally personal way this time around: “Our Mother’s Brief Affair” is a memory play, a tale told to the audience by Seth, and it’s plain to see that Mr. Greenberg was plugged directly into the socket of his own psychic life when he wrote it. While the results are flawed, I was never bored by “Our Mother’s Brief Affair,” and some parts of it are quite moving.

4097_444_294Ms. Lavin, the nominal star of the show, plays a physically attractive but “warm-cold” woman who has kept her children at arm’s length throughout her life. She is dissected by Seth in a stream of one-liners that have the sharp sting of well-remembered truth: “She had a tendency to pose…She was nostalgic but not for anything that had ever happened…She said five or six witty things, then repeated them.” The painfully inhibited Seth, who is enraged by Anna’s “decades of benign neglect,” is an even more striking character. A failed violist turned (unwillingly) celibate obituary writer, he is as disappointed with himself as Anna is disappointed with him: ”I’m…limited. One runs out of me quickly.” “Our Mother’s Brief Affair” gets all these things right, and the fact that Seth is a writer by trade justifies his quick-draw quippery. You buy him as a person—and you feel for him.

Unfortunately, “Our Mother’s Brief Affair” slithers off the track at midpoint…

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

A video featurette about Our Mother’s Brief Affair:

Replay: Carl Perkins sings “Blue Suede Shoes”

January 22, 2016 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERACarl Perkins sings “Blue Suede Shoes” on The Perry Como Show in 1956:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.)

Almanac: Karl Marx on work

January 22, 2016 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“The worker puts his life into the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, it belongs to the object.”

Karl Marx, “Alienated Labor”

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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