Three Hotels

Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, Mass.

(413) 597-3400

***

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The couple at the heart of this “thoughtful” revival of a 1992 Jon Robin Baitz play might as well be wearing “vacancy” signs over their hearts, said Don Aucoin in The Boston Globe. Once Peace Corps volunteers determined to change the world, they’ve become hollowed-out adults who each speak in monologues to the audience from hotel rooms in separate parts of the world. The husband, played by Steven Weber, is a corporate executive, and “it’s clear that he’s done his bit to change the world, all right.” But his success in marketing defective baby formula to poor Africans has had a corrosive effect on his marriage, as his wife, played by ER alum Maura Tierney, vividly makes clear. Both Weber and Tierney “deliver searching, solidly committed performances.” But because the script never allows them to interact, you get “the nagging feeling that there’s a bigger, better play locked inside.”

Even with its structural flaws, Three Hotels displays Baitz’s talent for “translating complicated feelings into a theatrical language that both sings and stings,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. It also allows for deliciously layered deliveries from its two gifted leads. Somehow, Tierney and Weber manage to create “a sustained, fraught dialogue within their characters and with their physically absent spouses.” Tierney especially “turns in a beautifully modulated, low-key performance.” She gives us not bitterness but anguish as this desolate woman “mourns the death of the husband that was,” and the ideals that had brought them together.