The Other Place

Lucille Lortel Theatre

New York

212) 279-4200

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

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.

Sign up

***

Sharr White’s haunting new play is “so cleverly constructed” that a simple plot summary is necessarily misleading, said Marilyn Stasio in Variety. At first, it seems to be a drama about a brilliant neurologist confronting her husband’s infidelity and the end of her marriage: A “dazzling” Laurie Metcalf seizes our attention from the outset as Juliana Smithton—“a formidable career woman” who makes it clear as she describes her personal crisis that she has “no patience for inferior minds.” But doubts about Juliana’s reliability as a narrator begin to arise when her husband, played by Dennis Boutsikaris, insists during a counseling session that they’re not heading for divorce. Eventually, the young woman who first “appears to be a marriage counselor” begins to seem more like an M.D. Not until the “shattering” final scene do we learn the full depth of Juliana’s plight.

We’re clued in to the crucial problem well before the finale, said Jeremy Gerard in Bloomberg.com. Despite Juliana’s conviction that she’s begun suffering mental lapses due to a brain tumor, the increasing difficulty she has with vocabulary and short-term memory points to dementia–—the same illness that she had been researching and developing a drug to treat. We watch this woman who is “used to being in control” fight fiercely against her new reality. Her husband, meanwhile, “finds himself jagging between empathy and anger” as he deals with her mental deterioration.

This is where White veers “a little too far in the direction of a weepy, disease-of-the-week television movie,” said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. “Once the play has spilled its secrets, it loses some of its dramatic charge.” But the saving grace of this production is Metcalf’s “commanding, almost scarily intense performance.” Although still most commonly known for her supporting role on TV’s Roseanne, the Tony-nominated actress has reeled off some impressive dramatic performances since her return to the stage. Uncontrolled anger can flare up in her Juliana “like lightning flashes” from a clear sky. But doubt, too, is taking hold of this once arrogant character. It “can almost be seen gathering in her piercing brown eyes.”