Collected Stories Broadway Reviews

Margulies' play certainly is schematic -- the audience pretty much sees where it's going right from the beginning -- but his characterizations are so incisive and his dialogue so rich that one hardly minds. The details of the New York literary scene are rendered with a rich authenticity; there's plenty of in-the-know name dropping, and the play gets one of its biggest laughs with a simple re-creation of the iconic 92nd Street Y logo.

Lavin is a joy to watch, investing Ruth with an appealing kind of cranky wisdom that only grows more pronounced as the woman ages ('Collected Stories' covers a span of six years). The actress gives one of those complete, nuanced performances, capturing the woman's intellectual vigor, her wry sense of humor and her increasing physical frailty with astonishing fidelity. And Lavin's sense of timing is superb, whether delivering a joke or acerbically dissecting the work of her protegee.

MTC head Lynne Meadow directs and skillfully guides the cast through Margulies' conversational and emotionally charged dialogue. Lavin is brilliant. She's a marvel to watch breathe life into Ruth as she goes from standoffish star writer to insecure and heartbreakingly vulnerable wreck. Paulson convincingly shifts from insecure hesitant, unpublished ugly duckling to a confident, if ruthless, literary swan poised to eclipse her hero.

Lavin is the raison d'être for the play's Broadway debut, an offering from Manhattan Theatre Club, which also presented the first New York outing. While director Lynne Meadow has not found anything new in the play—her production is quite close to the previous two—set designer Santo Loquasto's Greenwich Village apartment set is more spacious. But as the tough-minded Steiner, Lavin gives a master class in acting you miss at your peril. Her every intention is visible on her expressive face and in her daggerlike eyes. Many of her flavorful line readings are followed by exactly the right small gesture or shrug to underline the subtext.

But the real value of Collected Stories lies in the challenge it presents its two terrific actors, who spend the play parrying and sparring and cuffing each other, first with mother-and-cub affection and later with venomous resentment. Both Lavin and Paulson—under the direction of Lynne Meadow—give their all to the contest, and by the play's end, you can see what it costs them. Lavin plays this grand-dame writer as a down-to-earth diva. She may be sharply critical of her young disciple, but she's not inhumane. And in a confessional and vulnerable moment, when she shares the details of a youthful affair, her demeanor suddenly turns charmingly, disarmingly girlish.

As good actors age — perhaps a more felicitous word would be mature — they learn how to do more with less. Consider the left eyebrow of Linda Lavin, the veteran star of the new revival of Donald Margulies’s “Collected Stories.” At one point in this durable drama about the manners and morals of writers, Ms. Lavin raises said eyebrow by perhaps half an inch. She says nary a word, and doesn’t move any other muscle, but still communicates with this minimal gesture more than a lesser actor might squeeze from a long monologue. She gets a solid laugh too.

Little wonder that, for the third time since 1997, a New York theater has turned to 'Collected Stories.' Donald Margulies' drama delivers an engrossing, if somewhat schematic, couple of hours with just a single set and two actors. What sets this play apart from dozens of others with identical descriptions, however, is that the characters are interesting, intelligent women, for a change.'

It doesn't matter that the relationship between Ruth Steiner and Lisa Morrison follows a course so calculated, it could have been set by NASA. That's because they're played by the expert Linda Lavin and Sarah Paulson, respectively, who find a world of ambiguities in a fairly standard story.

The actresses and director Lynne Meadow ensure that debate is absorbing. Lavin's alternately funny and wrenching performance lets us see Ruth's repressed longings and regrets, while Paulson convincingly charts Lisa's evolution from self-conscious ingénue to self-possessed upstart.

Why, you ask, would Manhattan Theatre Club follow its premiere of Donald Margulies' Time Stands Still with a revival of Collected Stories — his crafty 1996 literary drama that's already been done twice in New York City? So we can hear Linda Lavin turn out two hours' worth of delicious bons mots like 'Life's too short for The New Yorker.' Lavin is relishing, but not milking, her role as a writer/professor/reluctant mentor; Deadwood's Sarah Paulson is ever-so-slightly (perhaps appropriately) grating as her sycophantic protégée.

While the play raises some pertinent questions about the intersections of life and art, at heart it’s a cozy, bookish West Village version of All About Eve. But the women are unevenly matched: The excerpts that Margulies gives us of Lisa’s supposedly promising work are unimpressive, and Paulson is not a sharp enough foil for the dramatic fencing required. Lavin deserves to be seen, but might be better appreciated elsewhere. Is it perverse to hope for an Off Broadway transfer?

By the end of Lynne Meadow's effective production, you've gotten hooked. But for the most part, 'Collected Stories' feels too polite, underwhelming and small. Linda Lavin gives a knockout performance as Ruth, marked by much humor and genuine emotion. Sarah Paulson looks too poised to play a student in her 20s, but becomes convincing as her character grows confident.

Anyone who takes acting seriously would walk a Broadway mile to see Linda Lavin play a distinguished but earthy author who is betrayed by the adoring protege who worms into her reclusive life. Pulitzer Prize-winning scribe Donald Margulies deftly if oh-so-laboriously lays out the groundwork for the final confrontation that allows Lavin to rip her guts out. Manhattan Theater Club a.d. Lynne Meadow, who previously directed Lavin in 'The Tale of the Allergist's Wife' and helms here, respects her star's firepower and has hired a classy tech-team to prove it. But lordy, lordy, what a boring play it is.

If Donald Margulies were a novelist, he'd churn out airport fiction, like John Grisham or Michael Crichton: popular, but not to be confused with art. Now Manhattan Theatre Club has revived Margulies’ 'Collected Stories,' a 1996 two-hander set in the world of genuine literature. It’s skillful, diverting stuff, but essentially, light reading.

Margulies offers no reason to believe that either Ruth or Lisa has ever written a word worth publishing. The gifted director, Lynne Meadow, indulges Lavin, who mutters, mugs, winces and sneers along with the yelling, as Paulson recedes into the attractive clutter of Santo Loquasto’s lovely faded facsimile of a Greenwich Village floor-through.