CRAZY MARY at Playwrights Horizons: A blast (with a heart)
CRAZY MARY at Playwrights Horizons: A blast (with a heart)
#1CRAZY MARY at Playwrights Horizons: A blast (with a heart)
Posted: 5/13/07 at 10:56pm
The title character in A.R. Gurney's new play is the scion of a formerly wealthy Buffalo family who has been interned in a tony sanatorium for the rich since the early 1970s. No one from the family has visited her in years, and she rarely speaks; she prefers to spend her days listening to classical music and opera on the radio in her room. Her solitude ends when her last living relative--a distant cousin who recently became her legal guardian--pops onto the scene to investigate the mysterious life that Mary has led since being committed. I had worried that in the hands of A.R. Gurney this scenario would come off as far too schematic and situational, but it turned out to be a lovely surprise; it's easily his best play in years. Unlike other recent works by the author, which have seemed promising but undercooked, Crazy Mary boasts fully-formed ideas and a drum tight dramatic arc that is both hilarious and harrowing. A few pieces fall flat (especially some tired and unnecessary shots at President Bush that have become unavoidable in Gurney's work of late), but a majority of the script is solid, and director Jim Simpson keeps the action moving at a steady pace. Sigourney Weaver makes a welcome return to the stage as the newly reconnected kin with ulterior motives, but the play belongs to the wonderful Kristine Nielsen, who is deeply affecting as a woman that time left behind. New York would be a much grimmer place without her sizable talents.
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"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
#2re: CRAZY MARY at Playwrights Horizons: A blast (with a heart)
Posted: 5/13/07 at 11:01pm
I love A R Gurney.
Lapped up his magnificant Indian Blood.
"Picture "The View," with the wisecracking, sympathetic sweethearts of that ABC television show replaced by a panel of embittered, suffering or enraged Arab women" -the Times review of Black Eyed
notabb
Broadway Star Joined: 5/12/03
#2re: CRAZY MARY at Playwrights Horizons: A blast (with a heart)
Posted: 5/31/07 at 12:46pmI have to agree. I saw CRAZY MARY and loved it. Wonderfully written and acted. I hear it's sold out but if it extends...grab a ticket
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