Roundabout Theatre Company presents this time-jumping play by J.B. Priestley (AN INSPECTOR CALLS). In 1919 Britain, Mrs. Conway (DOWNTON ABBEY's Elizabeth McGovern) is full of optimism during her daughter's lavish twenty-first birthday celebration. The Great War is over, wealth is in the air, and the family's dreams bubble over like champagne. Jump nineteen years into the future, though, and the Conways' lives have transformed unimaginably.
TIME AND THE CONWAYS takes place at the crossroads of today and tomorrow-challenging our notions of choice, chance and destiny. Tony winner Rebecca Taichman (INDECENT) directs.
Coming right off her deserved Tony win for staging Indecent, the director offers a case study of her own theory of time and its consequences: Indecent was the product of several years' development with the playwright and a fully integrated company. Time and the Conways, on the other hand, feels stitched together in a hurry, a costume drama with no coherent point of view and performances so at odds with one another as to screech like chalk on slate. McGovern is the chief victim of this; her shrill performance lacks the conviction necessary to make this monster mom compelling or even much more than a vague annoyance.
It's unclear why the Roundabout has chosen to mount this play, except perhaps that director Rebecca Taichman has staged it before, and Elizabeth McGovern, who played the kindly matriarch of a comparable family on Downton Abbey, was available to play the mother. The production features solid work from most of the actors, including Charlotte Parry as the intellectually ambitious Kay, Anna Camp as her pretty but vacuous sister Hazel, Steven Boyer as Hazel's brutish suitor-a bullet of a man-and Brooke Bloom, who makes welcomely bold choices as the sour socialist Madge. But Time and the Conways requires a stronger gravitational force than McGovern's airy performance provides. The center does not hold.
| 1938 | Broadway |
Broadway |
| 2017 | Broadway |
Roundabout Theatre Company Revival Broadway |
| Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Costume Design | Paloma Young |
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