At home, in the US, we were seeing combat the way we had never seen it before: live and direct. The play was written in 2009, a time by which reporters had become embedded in combat units. To me the most problematic scenes were precisely those that should have been at the heart of the play: war reporting. But those scenes are few and far in between the rest is about the trivia of everyday life: marriage, age difference, child-rearing.īarlow Adamson, Erica Spyres, Jeremiah Kissel, and Laura Latreille in TIME STANDS STILL. And there are a few scenes that deal with just that. The Lyric Stage presents it as a play about two war reporters adjusting to home after they come back from Iraq. Time Stands Still is never really in focus, never really has a theme. Why didn’t anybody see that? At the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, which had commissioned the play? At the other big name theaters that subsequently picked up the play? It had none of the dazzle, the wit, the searing emotion I expected from a writer like Margulies. To me the biggest disappointment is the play itself. But the way they are cast and directed points to a deeper malaise. Do not misunderstand me: The four actors in this production give their best-they are hardworking artists giving you your money’s worth. And when Jamie and Sarah made their entrance, I knew my hunch was correct. I describe this in detail because it advertised what the evening would be like. Instead there were things like an antique-ish globe of the world and a lot of uninteresting clutter. From what I know, creative people surround themselves with objects of their obsession: I expected enlarged prints, raw and disturbing. To make things worse, this loft is supposed to be the place where two very creative people live: James “Jamie” Dodd, war reporter, and Sarah Goodwin, war photographer. But THIS loft-the one on stage-simply said “Predictable.” This set advertised “We’re in a very bland space-no personality, no energy.” I mean there are lofts and there are lofts there is the crazy, jumbled, artist’s loft that thrills (or angers) with its disregard for convention and there is the multi-million-dollar, Trump-style loft, which someone once described as “late to middle Holiday Inn” at least these places have style-even if, as in the case of Trump, the style is iconically bad. But why go to the theater when I can see this sort of thing all day long on TV? A set is a play’s most potent advertisement. Realism! This would be a staging that reproduced reality without the vital ingredient of imagination. I should have known what I was in for when I sat down in the theater: The stage represented a contemporary loft in Brooklyn, reproduced in a so much detail as to leave nothing to the imagination. For the first 20 minutes, there wasn’t a single line that drew me in. I was looking forward to a story crafted by an expert story-teller-with surprising twists, sparkling dialogue that would take me to a place I had never been.Īnd then 10 minutes went by, 15, 20, and nothing worth recounting happened. After all, the play was written by one of this country’s most prolific and successful playwrights, Donald Margulies. I wish I could say otherwise, but this production of Time Stands Still was a disappointment.īelieve me, I attended it with high expectations. Laura Latreille in TIME STANDS STILL at the Lyric Stage.
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