Bill and Nancy have spent fifty full years as husband and wife. They practically breathe in unison, and can anticipate each other's every sigh, snore and sneeze. But just as they settle comfortably into their new home in Grand Horizons, the unthinkable happens: Nancy suddenly wants out. As their two adult sons struggle to cope with the shocking news, they are forced to question everything they assumed about the people they thought they knew best. By turns funny, shocking and painfully honest, Bess Wohl's new play explores a family turned upside-down and takes an intimate look at the wild, unpredictable, and enduring nature of love.
No doubt Wohl and her play have an appealing, compassionate spirit (first on displayed in the playwright's well-received Off Broadway plays American Hero and Small Mouth Sounds), and that goes a long way: Grand Horizons (the title is the name of Bill and Nancy's senior community) is a comfortable, comforting entertainment, its jokes more funny than not, its performances, by and large, expert. Alexander and Cromwell are marvels, pros elevating their material with subtlety and bring-it-home delivery.
To call 'Grand Horizons' one of the brightest shows to hit Broadway in years is not to tout its intelligence, which flickers. Rather, I mean that it is blindingly lit, no doubt in deference to the theatrical wisdom that defines comedy as what dies in the dark. And, boy, does 'Grand Horizons' want to sell itself as comedy. Not witty comedy with its verbal arabesques, nor intellectual comedy with its Paris Review name-checks, nor meta-comedy with its scrambled plotlines - but the vanilla kind that once dominated commercial theater. It's not entirely meant as praise to say that this Second Stage production is a big-laugh, blue-joke, bourgeois lark of the type Neil Simon mastered until the times mastered him and the genre petered out. There's a reason it did, and perhaps what the playwright Bess Wohl is attempting in 'Grand Horizons,' which opened on Thursday at the Helen Hayes Theater, is a last-ditch act of reclamation: a boulevard comedy for a cul-de-sac age.
2020 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2020 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Scenic Design for a Play | Clint Ramos |
2020 | Drama League Awards | Distinguished Performance Award | Michael Urie |
2020 | Drama League Awards | Outstanding Production of a Play | Grand Horizons |
2020 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding New Broadway Play | Grand Horizons |
2020 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Scenic Design | Clint Ramos |
2020 | Tony Awards | Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play | Jane Alexander |
2020 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Bess Wohl |
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