Laura Linney is in love. Just watch the radiant expression on her face as she wraps her arms around the character of Lucy Barton, a role she played in two separate engagements at the Bridge Theater…
The feeling is obviously mutual, because the character of Lucy Barton returns the actor’s commitment with a quiet but searing fidelity to her visionary performance. Actors often speak of “inhabiting” a role; here, the devotion feels reciprocal.
Like the spare but elegant novel by Elizabeth Strout , on which Rona Munro based this theatrical treatment, the dynamic is the elementary, fraught relationship between mothers and daughters. Here, the situation is not the expected one between a mother on her deathbed and a daughter struggling to affirm the nature of their relationship before their inevitable final parting. In this case, it’s the daughter who lies on the hospital bed and the long-estranged mother who comes to visit.
Tightly framed by set designer Bob Crowley’s backdrop of a beautiful if untouchable Manhattan, the impressionistic narrative unfolds in full view of those spectators allowed to sit on two sides of the stage. Although the look is smart and sophisticated, there’s really nothing in the script that calls for the confessional/courtroom staging. Still, smart and sophisticated is nothing to sneeze at — not with the glorious Chrysler Building in the background.
Mother and daughter relationships are always complicated, to say the least. But they don’t necessarily have to be vicious and destructive, either. That’s not Strout’s style, and it’s not what directoris going for, in his viscerally penetrating but emotionally restrained directorial approach.
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