Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, Mass.
(413) 597-3400
***
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
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.
Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.
-
If/Thenfeature Tony-winning Idina Menzel “looks and sounds sensational” in a role tailored to her talents.
-
Rocky
feature It’s a wonder that this Rocky ever reaches the top of the steps.
-
Love and Information
feature Leave it to Caryl Churchill to create a play that “so ingeniously mirrors our age of the splintered attention span.”
-
The Bridges of Madison County
feature Jason Robert Brown’s “richly melodic” score is “one of Broadway’s best in the last decade.”
-
Outside Mullingar
feature John Patrick Shanley’s “charmer of a play” isn’t for cynics.
-
The Night Alive
feature Conor McPherson “has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension.”
-
No Man’s Land
feature The futility of all conversation has been, paradoxically, the subject of “some of the best dialogue ever written.”
-
The Commons of Pensacola
feature Stage and screen actress Amanda Peet's playwriting debut is a “witty and affecting” domestic drama.