In today’s Wall Street Journal I review an important off-Broadway revival, Keen Company’s production of Lanford Wilson’s Lemon Sky, and take brief but delighted note of the New Haven transfer of the Irish Rep’s revival of Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney. Here’s an excerpt.
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Lanford Wilson was big in the ’70s and ’80s, but the author of “The Hot l Baltimore” and “Talley’s Folly” had largely faded from view by the time of his death in March. It’s been ages since a Wilson play received a high-profile production in New York, and three years since I last reviewed one anywhere in America. For this reason, Keen Company’s Off-Broadway revival of “Lemon Sky” is an occasion of no small consequence, an opportunity to take a second look at a once-admired playwright who has fallen out of fashion–and the news is good. Not only does “Lemon Sky” turn out to be a play of exceptional quality, but Jonathan Silverstein’s production is an extraordinarily strong and finely acted piece of work.
First performed in 1970, revived Off Broadway in 1985 and turned into a TV movie three years after that, “Lemon Sky” is, like so many of Mr. Wilson’s plays, a variation on a theme by Tennessee Williams, a memory play about a sensitive teenage boy (Keith Nobbs) and the boorish father (Kevin Kilner) who doesn’t understand him. The setting is San Diego in the ’50s, that benighted decade of backyard cookouts and wholesome-looking families, and you will not be even slightly surprised to hear that the sensitive teenage boy is gay, while the boorish father turns out to have a few high-voltage kinks of his own. We are, in short, in the land of “The Glass Menagerie,” and no sooner does Alan, Wilson’s fictional stand-in, inform the audience that “I’ve been trying to tell this story, to get it down, for a long time” than you roll your eyes and start thinking about where to have dinner after the show.
Well, guess what? You’re in for a surprise–a very big surprise. For even though the plot of “Lemon Sky” is well worn and the premise predictable, Alan tells his tale of woe with a transfiguring intensity far removed from the soft-centered sentimentality of such better-known Wilson plays as “Burn This.” Perhaps because “Lemon Sky” was explicitly autobiographical, Mr. Wilson got the bit between his teeth and ran hard with it, and the result is a play whose angry portrayal of Eisenhower-era family life has the salty sting of remembered truth…
If you missed the Irish Repertory Theatre’s Off-Broadway revival of Brian Friel’s “Molly Sweeney” earlier this year, you can now catch it at Long Wharf Theatre, which is remounting Charlotte Moore’s production on a larger stage. Two of the three original cast members, Jonathan Hogan and Ciarán O’Reilly, are reprising their roles in New Haven, joined by Simone Kirby, who replaced Geraldine Hughes in the title role later in the New York run. Mr. Friel’s masterly play, in which three related monologues are woven around one another like strands of ivy, tells the story of an Irishwoman (Ms. Kirby) who has been blind since childhood and whose sight is miraculously restored by surgery in middle age. What follows is a parable of false hope and devastating disappointment, staged by Ms. Moore with gentle grace, performed to perfection by her cast and lit with special delicacy by Michael Gottlieb and Richard Pilbrow….
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Read the whole thing here.
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
