#1
Posted: 5/8/07 at 7:03pm
Note: I'm not trying to replace Margo. -- Yankee
Matt Murray is mostly positive:
"...While the same is true of this 10th and final installment, Radio Golf is not likely to be short-listed among the playwright's best. But the new production of it at the Cort proves that this play, which Wilson completed shortly before his death in 2005, is nonetheless a worthy and indelible part of Wilson's immense theatrical achievement.
...
What's missing are many of the shadings and the lyricism that have always defined Wilson's writing. Leon's experience as a Wilson interpreter serves the production well, and his staging efficiently ties the foggy past to the looming future. Scenic design, David Gallo's makeshift-oasis office set, translates this visually, providing an almost-but-not-quite respite from the poverty quite literally surrounding it on all sides. But they can't disguise that this is Wilson's least overtly musical play, one that attempts to find in the halting cadences of modern speech employed by Harmond, Mame, and Roosevelt the sound of ordinary people.
...
But it's unavoidable and forgivable that the characters and the play itself give into the cyclical nature of history and depict a return to one's roots: Nearly every other Wilson play has recommended, or demanded, that be recognized as the path to enlightenment. Harmond learns that it's not the mistakes, but how one works to rectify them that matters in the end; weaknesses, however devastating they may appear at the time, may vanish over the grander scheme of a life. Similarly, Radio Golf's weaknesses don't diminish Wilson's full chronicle, and its strengths more than justify it as a highly fitting finale to one of American theatre's most estimable epics."
http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/RadioGolf2007.html
Matt Murray is mostly positive:
"...While the same is true of this 10th and final installment, Radio Golf is not likely to be short-listed among the playwright's best. But the new production of it at the Cort proves that this play, which Wilson completed shortly before his death in 2005, is nonetheless a worthy and indelible part of Wilson's immense theatrical achievement.
...
What's missing are many of the shadings and the lyricism that have always defined Wilson's writing. Leon's experience as a Wilson interpreter serves the production well, and his staging efficiently ties the foggy past to the looming future. Scenic design, David Gallo's makeshift-oasis office set, translates this visually, providing an almost-but-not-quite respite from the poverty quite literally surrounding it on all sides. But they can't disguise that this is Wilson's least overtly musical play, one that attempts to find in the halting cadences of modern speech employed by Harmond, Mame, and Roosevelt the sound of ordinary people.
...
But it's unavoidable and forgivable that the characters and the play itself give into the cyclical nature of history and depict a return to one's roots: Nearly every other Wilson play has recommended, or demanded, that be recognized as the path to enlightenment. Harmond learns that it's not the mistakes, but how one works to rectify them that matters in the end; weaknesses, however devastating they may appear at the time, may vanish over the grander scheme of a life. Similarly, Radio Golf's weaknesses don't diminish Wilson's full chronicle, and its strengths more than justify it as a highly fitting finale to one of American theatre's most estimable epics."
http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/RadioGolf2007.html
