Four-time Emmy winner, two-time Golden Globe winner, three-time Academy Award and four-time Tony nominee Laura Linney returns to Broadway in a haunting new solo play adapted by Rona Munro from the bestselling novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout. A sold-out sensation originally produced by the London Theatre Company at the Bridge Theatre in London, Ms. Linney was hailed as "luminous" by the The New York Times, "genuinely phenomenal" by Time Out, and the play was called "deeply affecting and heartbreaking" by The Observer.
Linney plays Lucy Barton, a woman who wakes after an operation to find - much to her surprise - her mother at the foot of her bed. They haven't seen each other in years. During their days-long visit, Lucy tries to understand her past, works to come to terms with her family, and begins to find herself as a writer. This spellbinding story is directed by five-time Olivier Award winner Richard Eyre "with a keen-eyed compassion." - The New York Times
In her books Olive Kitteridge and Anything is Possible, Elizabeth Strout adopts a complex linked-story structure to explore character and milieu. But her slender, tremendously affecting 2016 novel, My Name is Lucy Barton, is as direct, deceptively straightforward and singularly focused as its title implies. At the same time, it unfolds a wealth of seemingly unrelated mini-narratives, personal insights and half-buried memories to draw the complicated connection of a daughter to her flinty mother, reconciling with the legacy of a miserable childhood. That duality, between the emotional immediacy of the present and the impressionistic filter of the past, is distilled with faithful exactitude in Laura Linney's finely calibrated performance in the title role.
Alone on stage for the 90-minute running time of the show, which opened Wednesday at Broadway's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, Linney skillfully segues between the authorial voice of Lucy and the sharp Midwestern twang of her mother without ever veering into caricature. Bob Crowley's simple set design, supplemented by Luke Halls' video projections, helps set the scene for Linney's performance, which maintains a cunning sense of narrative progression even as she digresses far off the beaten path. (The adaptation is by Rona Munro.) Under Richard Eyre's nuanced direction, she maintains full command of the story even as it meanders from Lucy's hospital stay to flashbacks to her hardscrabble, TV-free Illinois upbringing to glimpses at a future success borne of sacrifice and loss.
| 2018 | London |
London Premiere Production London |
| 2020 | Broadway |
Manhattan Theatre Club Broadway Premiere Production Broadway |
| Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Solo Performance | Laura Linney |
| 2020 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Solo Performance | Laura Linney |
| 2020 | Tony Awards | Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play | Laura Linney |
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