This Wide Night

Peter Jay Sharp Theatre

New York

(212) 279-4200

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On the surface, very little happens in playwright Chloë Moss’ starkly realistic drama This Wide Night, said Erik Haagensen in Back Stage. Yet Edie Falco and Allison Pill turn Anne Kauffman’s “modest” production into something marvelous. Pill plays Marie, an ex-con living in a squalid one-room flat somewhere in London. A knock at the door reveals Lorraine, Marie’s former prison bunkmate—a shuffling, disheveled Falco. Years before, it turns out, Marie promised Lorraine that she could room with her upon release. As Lorraine’s stay drags on, the relationship between these damaged women alternates between “bursts of high spirits” and moments of “sullenness and argument.” Gradually, the audience finds itself fascinated by their “delicate dance of wary friendship.”

Moss’ play “follows a rather predictable path,” said Brian Scott Lipton in Theatermania.com. To her credit, though, the playwright never succumbs to the temptation to steer her narrative in “some contrived or surprising direction,” such as having her characters “plot a bank robbery or engage in torrid lesbian sex.” Nor does she engage in social criticism, teaching the audience lessons about the plight of women who’ve done hard time. Instead, Moss simply creates two meticulously observed characters. She wrote the play after spending time with female prisoners, and it shows in the utterly realistic dialogue.

Tasked with delivering Moss’ lines are two actresses “at the top of their game,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Falco is “virtually unrecognizable” from her days on The Sopranos. Clad in “sweat clothes and a big pair of eyeglasses,” she disappears into her character so completely that “you wouldn’t look at her twice on the street.” Pill, on the rebound from the disappointing Broadway revival of The Miracle Worker, creates a convincing portrayal of a “prickly child-woman who never evolved naturally into adulthood.” Together, the two women make the audience’s time with their “sad, vacillating” characters seem both heartbreaking and completely enveloping. “I could have raptly watched them for another hour or so.”