(Saltz) 'Lemon Sky' (closes on Saturday) The Keen Company's revival of Lanford Wilson's 1970 memory play is vivified by Keith Nobbs's engaging performance.
(Rooney) 'Lemon Sky' The Keen Company's revival of Lanford Wilson's 1970 memory play is vivified by Keith Nobbs's engaging performance.
Williams's heartbreaking memory play is drenched in the playwright's regret for failing to protect his sister from a lobotomy.
The sense that we're watching a memory play is heightened: in the final refrain of Roll Back the Years, the elderly Viv reaches back towards her past as if remembering everything she's lost.
Packing action into a memory play is no mean feat, but Travelling North not only lacks narrative drive, it offers none of the reflective wisdom that might be its saving grace.
The odds are definitely stacked in favor of the demons, I'm afraid, when we learn that the lead role in the writer's memory play is being portrayed by his own mother, a well-known actress and twinkly-eyed narcissist, and the rehearsals are regularly invaded by his estranged father, who belittles and mocks the enterprise with lip-smacking viciousness.
But the other trick my memory often plays is arranging past events into a configuration that casts me, or those I love, in the best possible light.
Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic".
Written with delicacy and old-school craftsmanship, "Indian Blood," which opened last night at the 59E59 Theaters in a Primary Stages production, is a modest memory play that is endowed with a measure of emotional heft by its unchallenged but unusually strong cast.
BROTHER AND SISTER GET REALLY CLOSE IN 'THE GLASS MENAGERIE' -- The Wingfields, the financially distressed and emotionally fractured family in Tennessee Williams's memory play, have never been known as a touchy-feely clan.
