On the verge of death for the umpteenth time, Anna (Linda Lavin) makes a shocking confession to her grown children: an affair from her past that just might have resonance beyond the family. But how much of what she says is true? While her children try to separate fact from fiction, Anna fights for a legacy she can be proud of. With razor-sharp wit and extraordinary insight, Our Mother's Brief Affair considers the sweeping, surprising impact of indiscretions both large and small.
It can't be easy for anyone to live up to Mr. Greenberg's analytical eloquence, especially in a lyrical memory play in which the object of his descriptions is often required to stand mute and embody what's being said about her. Yet throughout this Manhattan Theater Club production, directed a shade too tentatively by Lynne Meadow, Ms. Lavin's poses unfailingly match, and even amplify, Mr. Greenberg's exquisite prose. Anna is but the latest addition to a memorable gallery of sharp-tongued Jewish mothers created by Ms. Lavin during the past several decades...But none of those roles asked quite as much of her as Anna, who is required to exist in both middle and old age, in recollection and reality, sometimes all at once. Ms. Lavin fulfills these demands with such thoroughness and subtlety that I wish the play that surrounds her were more compellingly realized.
Not even the sainted Linda Lavin can save the deeply unpleasant character she plays in 'Our Mother's Brief Affair,' a lazy play by Richard Greenberg...Stubbornly lacking in dramatic tension, the uneventful narrative features a mean-spirited woman who may or may not be on her deathbed, recounting a closely held secret to her disagreeable grown children. There's little to fault in the attractively mounted and very well cast production...Lavin's keen acerbic wit is wasted...on a character like Anna, who is, truth to tell, a sour woman with bitter views of everyone but herself.
2015 | Broadway |
Manhattan Theatre Club Original Broadway Production Broadway |
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