Time Stands Still Broadway Reviews

New plays of substance remain sadly rare on Broadway, and return engagements are almost unheard of, which makes this remounting of 'Time Stands Still' as brave as it is unusual. Thankfully audiences who couldn't make time for this rewarding play last spring now have a second chance to catch it.

On second viewing, I found the play even more satisfying. Margulies, a gifted playwright, tells the story of a photojournalist Sarah Goodwin (Linney) and reporter James Dodd (d'Arcy James), who have been collaborating and cohabiting for 8 1/2 unwed years and are just back in their Brooklyn loft.

Seven months later, Donald Margulies' play is back in fine form, now at the Cort Theatre with Christina Ricci. The film actress known for edgy work in 'Monster' and 'The Opposite of Sex' proves herself delightfully natural on stage playing a young woman who tends to look on the bright side.

Laura Linney was a star, but not yet the star of her own Showtime series, 'The Big C,' when the Manhattan Theatre Club opened 'Time Stands Still' last winter. But she already had a quiet, dazzling honesty as Sarah, a war photographer recovering back home in her Williamsburg loft after almost being killed in a roadside bombing in Iraq.

Laura Linney -- whose initial performance of Sarah earned her a Tony nomination -- has made her less abrasive this time around. A welcome side effect is that we now understand better what Sarah's writer boyfriend, James (Brian d'Arcy James), sees in her.

Following a six-month hiatus, the handsome production directed by Daniel Sullivan reopened Thursday at the Cort Theatre. Christina Ricci makes an admirable Broadway debut as the perky character originated by Alicia Silverstone but otherwise the show has changed little in the process.

Following a limited run at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre last season, Donald Margulies’s dexterous drama has now returned for another shot. If the writing is occasionally well-crafted to a fault, this minor flaw is mitigated by Daniel Sullivan’s attentive direction, which elicits an exquisitely nuanced central performance from Linney and strong supporting ones from the rest of the cast, which includes a rumpled Eric Bogosian as a magazine editor and Christina Ricci (stepping in for Alicia Silverstone) as his unsophisticated young girlfriend. For all its carefully woven-in themes—about personal versus professional priorities, the ethics and limits of representation, and more—the play is perhaps best appreciated as an artfully composed picture of a woman in a quiet crisis of her own, who feels safer in war than in love.

In addition, there are too many easy laughs at the expense of Mandy, the somewhat ditsy young girlfriend of Richard, Sarah and James' editor. Margulies also pokes glib fun at guilty liberals who alleviate their concern over problems abroad by attending plays about them. Will enough Broadway theatergoers pay more than $100 to laugh at themselves?

What do you get when you combine three world-weary intellectuals and an ingénue? Fish in a barrel—and an opportunity to make facile points about youth, lightness, and cheer. Ricci manages her comic duties ably, but the evening’s real virtue is still in watching Linney rise above the limitations of Margulies’s script.

Margulies gets a lot of mileage out of the older-man-younger-woman situation — as Sarah says to Richard: 'I think it's sweet: You always wanted a little girl' — but he admirably makes Mandy more than just a pretty little punchline. In her stage debut, the doe-eyed Ricci holds her own with her three costars, theatrical heavyweights all. And in her second go at the role, Linney has zoomed in on little bits of warmth in the detached, screwed-up woman who lives her life, unapologetically, behind the lens.

On one level, this work -- about a female photojournalist and her writer boyfriend coping with the physical and emotional aftereffects of her near-death experience while covering the Iraq War -- deals with such themes as the responsibilities of journalists to their subjects and the thrill-seeking addiction that drives them. But the playwright cannily uses this as a framework to explore the shifting trajectories of relationships, with longtime but unmarried couple Sarah (Linney) and James (d'Arcy James) discovering that the incident has dramatically shifted their priorities and emotional needs.

In its limited run, Time Stands Still was one of last season's best new plays and among the most satisfying evenings on Broadway. Its return open run, with Ricci's replacement of Alicia Silverstone the only cast change and the three returning actors giving even richer performances, is bound to be among this season's cream as well.

'The camera's there to record it; that's life,' explains Linney, who gives a persuasive account of a woman incapable of seeing a dividing line between herself and her work. It's a portrayal that, among other things, reaffirms one's faith in the essential work of the professional witness.