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.
Its inorganic mysticism aside, the play functions more readily as a naturalistic English drawing-room drama of the period, examining the shifting tides of wealth and class, the cost of bourgeois complacency, the failure of political idealism, and the loss of prosperity, position and security for one well-off Yorkshire family between the wars. Those themes provide a kinship to Chekhov, particularly The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters, though this is a vastly inferior work to those plays, or to Priestley's better-known An Inspector Calls. However, Roundabout at least deserves credit for casting its net beyond the established classics....Time and the Conways is a funny old play, interesting more for its structural adventurousness than its thematic trenchancy. And while Taichman and her uneven cast can't obscure the writing's weaknesses, the production closes on a forceful note that makes it retroactively quite satisfying.
If only the play itself lived up to the extravagant - and admittedly powerful - visual metaphor that Patel and Taichman have created for it. But despite intermittent moving moments, the text often feels clunky, dated, and more than a bit sentimental. Taichman, whose work with her actors is sharper in the second act, overplays the first act's saccharine notes, and Paloma Young's costumes fall into the same trap: In 1937, they're crisp and evocative. In 1919, they feel like cotton candy - too sugary, too fluffy, too, well, costume-ish. With so many nails being hit squarely on the head, out in the audience it's easy to feel caught in one of Dunne's time-bending premonitions: We're constantly ahead of the events unfolding in front of us.
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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