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Amanda Peet “is something of a creative magpie,” said Tom Teodorczuk in The Independent (U.K.). For her playwriting debut, the stage and screen actress has borrowed the best traits of the fine writers and directors she’s worked with to create a “witty and affecting” domestic drama. Peet’s story about a family laid low by the imprisonment of a Bernie Madoff–like patriarch “might sound like a Vanity Fair feature.” But Peet, with help from stars Blythe Danner and Sarah Jessica Parker, has turned material that might have felt like yesterday’s news into one of theater’s most penetrating studies of the mother-daughter dynamic in years.
“Give Peet credit,” too, “for attempting to wrestle with issues whose defining characteristic is that they won’t lie flat,” said Jesse Green in New York magazine. Danner’s Judith has been reduced to living in a box-like Florida condominium, and we’re encouraged to wonder how complicit she was in her husband’s frauds and whether this comeuppance represents justice. But the storytelling is “as clunky and baldly functional” as the set’s Home Depot–level decor: When Parker’s Becca arrives for Thanksgiving with a journalist boyfriend in tow, we know he’s there for a scoop, while later arrivals herald equally predictable complications. The characters all “talk fast and snappy,” but occasional moments of amusement “cannot disguise the loud hum of the play’s gears at work.”
“There is definitely a cup or two of soap in the plot’s churning waters,” said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. But Peet has given her two leads “rich material to chew on.” Danner “exudes the chilly pride” of a woman who feels she doesn’t deserve her fate, and Parker, in her first stage performance in a decade, transmits Becca’s turmoil “with admirable clarity.” Just don’t expect the two of them to address the hard questions here, said Marilyn Stasio in Variety. Judith gets probed about her complicity, but only by characters, including the boyfriend, who presume her to be guilty. The empathetic Becca is the one person here who might elicit an honest response. She never does, though, “and that, unfortunately, pretty much takes the sting out of the play.”
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August 9 editorial cartoonsCartoons Saturday's political cartoons include snake oil salesmen, Ghislaine Maxwell's new residence, and more
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5 hastily redrawn cartoons about redistrictingCartoons Artists take on Donald Trump's draughtsmanship, the White House ballroom, and more
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Bonnie Blue: taking clickbait to extremesTalking Point Channel 4 claims documentary on the adult performer's attention-grabbing sex stunts is opening up a debate
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If/Thenfeature Tony-winning Idina Menzel “looks and sounds sensational” in a role tailored to her talents.
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Rocky
feature It’s a wonder that this Rocky ever reaches the top of the steps.
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Love and Information
feature Leave it to Caryl Churchill to create a play that “so ingeniously mirrors our age of the splintered attention span.”
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The Bridges of Madison County
feature Jason Robert Brown’s “richly melodic” score is “one of Broadway’s best in the last decade.”
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Outside Mullingar
feature John Patrick Shanley’s “charmer of a play” isn’t for cynics.
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The Night Alive
feature Conor McPherson “has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension.”
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No Man’s Land
feature The futility of all conversation has been, paradoxically, the subject of “some of the best dialogue ever written.”
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A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder
feature “Bloodlust hasn’t sung so sweetly, or provided so much theatrical fun, since Sweeney Todd first wielded his razor.”