‘My Name is Lucy Barton’: Laura Linney shines

‘MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON’: Laura Linney. Photo: Matthew Murphy

MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON
Written by Elizabeth Strout
Adapted by Rona Munro
Directed by Richard Eyre
Through February 29, 2020
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th Street
212-239-6200
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

By David NouNou

Lucy Barton (Laura Linney) has a lot to say about her life from childhood to current day, but not in a very cohesive manner. She repeatedly claims “that everyone has one important story in them to tell,” and this is her story. This monologue is told in 90 minutes with no intermission. However, the show feels more like an outpouring of events and tales where a patient tells the psychiatrist their problems and in this case the audience is in the role of the psychiatrist.

As the show commences, Lucy is in a hospital room telling of her stay there years ago when she was admitted for an appendectomy and had to stay for nine weeks (no explanation is given for that length of time). Lucy grew up in rural heartland farm country in Amgash, Illinois with distant parents and an older brother and sister. They were abused and humiliated as children by their parents. She grew up being a smart child and came to New York on a scholarship and got married and has two daughters. While in the hospital, she was visited by her long-estranged mother (Ms. Linney, doubling up as her mother) traveling all alone from Amgash. Lucy, while in pain, wanted to hear the stories her mother used to tell about the eccentric people back in Amgash and the gossip her mother told about the people she knew when she was growing up.

We know that Lucy had a wonderful, kind Jewish doctor who got her through her illness. Her mother foretells that Lucy is going to have a troubled marriage later on, and leaves her again to go back home. No spoiler alert here, but Ms. Strout did write a few novels retelling her stories: that she went back to Amgash nine years later to comfort her mother before she died, went back a year later to visit her father before he died. As Lucy’s mother had foretold, Lucy ends up divorcing her husband because he had an affair with the babysitter who took care of their girls while she was in the hospital. Lucy witnessed the advent of AIDS and 9/11. Lucy wrote books and became successful, but her guilt never left her.

Whether the guilt of leaving her family, whether becoming a successful writer, whether divorcing her husband, whether her daughters resented her, Lucy observed a lot of pain around her, and has remorse about the decisions she made. She is a good woman with a lot of issues.

What anchors this stream of consciousness is the brilliant Laura Linney. Ms. Linney’s finest stage works have been done at the Manhattan Theatre Club with Sight Unseen; Time Stands Still, The Little Foxes and now My Name is Lucy Barton. She embodies every nuance of the narrative whether it is her depiction of her mother and their troubled relationship, or the gay friend/neighbor who died of AIDS, or her brother and sister’s resentment of her for leaving Illinois for a better life, or recalling her daughter yelling “Mommy!” when she saw the second plane crashing into the second tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11, she imbues every moment with humanity and humility. Ms. Linney is at her touching best when she recalls an incident of someone yelling “Mommy;” was it her younger daughter yelling for her or was it she calling out for her own mother? Although there are many narrative gaps in My Name is Lucy Barton, Ms. Linney fills them with her passion and consistently engaging stage presence.

Edited by Scott Harrah
Published January 20, 2020
Reviewed at January 18, 2020 press performance.