On the verge of death for the umpteenth time, Anna (Linda Lavin) makes a shocking confession to her grown children: an affair from her past that just might have resonance beyond the family. But how much of what she says is true? While her children try to separate fact from fiction, Anna fights for a legacy she can be proud of. With razor-sharp wit and extraordinary insight, Our Mother's Brief Affair considers the sweeping, surprising impact of indiscretions both large and small.
If the playwright Richard Greenberg didn't write the role for Linda Lavin, he might as well have, so perfectly does it suit and flatter her. It may in fact suit and flatter her too well; sometimes one would like to see Lavin clawing her way out of a role instead of slipping so smoothly into it. Here, she wears Anna as fetchingly as Anna wears the perfectly cut Burberry trench coat she imbues with talismanic powers of mysterious romance. It is just such a romance that forms the central (and really the only) plot of this entertaining but threadbare play...If I had to guess, I'd say that Greenberg got trapped (much as Anna does) by what must have felt like a daring idea.
No one plays Jewish mothers with secrets better than Linda Lavin...You recognize these women right away, because Lavin plays them so hilariously to New York Jewish type: She has a cartoonist's control and economy of line. But to recognize them is not, it turns out, to know them...Greenberg's writing is elegant and keenly epigrammatic...Directed with canny ambiguity by Lynne Meadow, Our Mother's Brief Affair lets you to wonder how much this scandal has been retouched. But there is no doubt as to the casual mastery that Lavin, at 78, brings to the part. Shifting in and out of the past, elevating one-liners to three-dimensionality, she brings a lifetime of command to the stage. She owns this part and claims it like nobody's business but her own.
2015 | Broadway |
Manhattan Theatre Club Original Broadway Production Broadway |
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