Our Mother's Brief Affair
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Cititour.com Review
Watch out for Linda Lavin. In Richard Greenberg’s new memory play Our Mother’s Brief Affair, the septuagenarian actress delivers her lines with a restrained bite that accentuates their sting. She plays Anna, a woman battling Alzheimer’s whose admission to a short extramarital dalliance stuns her adult children, and sends them on a journey to the past to try to understand their complicated, often distant mother.
In Manhattan Theatre Club’s latest Broadway outing, directed by Lynne Meadow, Greenberg again wrestles with a troubled family in different decades, though not as successfully as he did with the Tony-nominated The Assembled Parties, which Meadow and MTC staged three years ago. When his current offering gets to its denouement, it becomes a thoughtful exploration of the ramifications of our ability to blame and forgive ourselves, but along the way it can be a choppy, laborious two-hour journey.
As it jumps from 1973 to 2003 and 2006, Our Mother’s Brief Affair focuses on what happens after the ailing Anna casually asks her son, Seth (Greg Keller), “Did I ever tell you about my affair?” Seth and his twin sister, Abby (Kate Arrington), don’t know what to make of this bombshell but soon learn from their mother that her lover (John Procaccino) was a man she met in the park when her kids were teenagers and she used to ferry Seth from Long Island to Manhattan on Saturdays for his music lesson. Both Anna and her paramour harbor secrets beyond their relationship — at least that’s what she tells her children — but it could be just what her impaired memory believes.
Greenberg’s use of language is as sharp as ever. Seth, who regularly addresses the audience, describes his mother as “nostalgic but not for anything that had ever happened” and her vocal mannerism as “Flatbush-on-the-Thames.” But the most compelling scenes are between Lavin and Procaccino, the latter playing a character who harbors no guilt for a family betrayal committed years ago, while Anna struggles to assuage her conscience over a lesser mistake. Lavin brings beautifully muted passion to a woman Seth describes as “warm-cold” — and makes this an Affair worth remembering.
By Diane Snyder
Visit the Site
http://ourmothersbriefaffairbroadway.com
Cast
Linda Lavin, Kate Arrington, Greg Keller, John Procaccino
Open/Close Dates
Opening 1/20/2016
Closing 3/6/2016
Preview Open/ Preview Close Dates
Preview Opening 12/28/2015
Closing Open-ended
Box Office
212-239-6200
Theatre Info
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th Street
New York, NY 10036
Map
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