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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

People will talk

October 14, 2016 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review an off-Broadway revival of Horton Foote’s The Roads to Home and the Broadway premiere of Simon Stephens’ Heisenberg. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

118377It’s no surprise that playwrights naturally gravitate to the spectacular in preference to the commonplace. It takes a special kind of writer to find compelling beauty in the ordinary, and Horton Foote did it better than anyone. Witness Michael Wilson’s revival of “The Roads to Home,” Foote’s 1982 triptych of tightly intertwined one-act plays whose subject is the melancholy that pierces the souls of women who can’t go home again. On the surface, scarcely anything happens in “The Roads to Home,” a conversation piece whose gossipy characters fritter away their days chatting about what seems to be nothing in particular. But Mr. Wilson, Foote’s protégé, knows that the talk in his plays is far from aimless, and this richly involving Primary Stages revival serves as a reminder that you needn’t set off firecrackers to seize an audience’s attention….

It’s impossible to say enough good things about Mr. Wilson’s production, which makes the best possible use of the arm’s-length intimacy afforded by the Cherry Lane Theatre’s 179-seat mainstage auditorium. So do the members of his cast, all of whom are wholly conversant with Foote’s idiom…

The Manhattan Theatre Club has found a recipe for success: Produce pretentiously titled British two-handers about odd couples who meet cute. Nick Payne’s “Constellations,” which went over big last season, filled the bill to overflowing, and so does “Heisenberg,” the latest play from Simon Stephens, who scored even bigger with his stage version of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.” Evidently he’s now out to prove that he can write a play that, unlike its predecessor, doesn’t rely on scenic bells and whistles. He can, but that doesn’t mean that “Heisenberg” is any good. It is, in fact, blush-makingly trite, a portrait of a 42-year-old blabbermouth (Mary-Louise Parker) who stalks a never-married 75-year-old butcher (Denis Arndt) and lures him into the sack, thereby freeing him of his incapacitating inhibitions and allowing him to lead the more abundant emotional life of his dreams….

The result is, not to put too fine a point on it, a blatant exercise in masculine wish fulfillment…

* * *

To read my review of The Roads to Home, go here.

To read my review of Heisenberg, go here.

The members of the cast of The Roads to Home talk about the play:

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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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