Our Mother's Brief Affair - 2015 - Broadway Tickets, News, Info & More

An "Affair" to Remember, Even if Her Kids Would Prefer to Forget - NBC New York

Linda Lavin is alternately sardonic and fragile in the New York premiere of Richard Greenberg's drama "Our Mother's Brief Affair"...The notion of "legacy" weighs heavily in the drama, which touches on themes such as the suburban dream, and the desire, when one's life is nearing its end, "to be known"...Lavin...paints a balanced portrait here, as a Long Island mom who dutifully raised two kids despite being in a marriage that was never romantic... Greenberg...is making a point about "scale," that some loads we carry through life-the burdens that bring us shame-are worse than others, and that after a point we must forgive ourselves. It's a point I'd gander he might have made more elegantly without the plot twist, but nonetheless, with Lavin leading the cast, it's a beautifully performed play.

Review: ‘Our Mother’s Brief Affair,’ a Play About Unmoored Lives - New York Times

It can't be easy for anyone to live up to Mr. Greenberg's analytical eloquence, especially in a lyrical memory play in which the object of his descriptions is often required to stand mute and embody what's being said about her. Yet throughout this Manhattan Theater Club production, directed a shade too tentatively by Lynne Meadow, Ms. Lavin's poses unfailingly match, and even amplify, Mr. Greenberg's exquisite prose. Anna is but the latest addition to a memorable gallery of sharp-tongued Jewish mothers created by Ms. Lavin during the past several decades...But none of those roles asked quite as much of her as Anna, who is required to exist in both middle and old age, in recollection and reality, sometimes all at once. Ms. Lavin fulfills these demands with such thoroughness and subtlety that I wish the play that surrounds her were more compellingly realized.