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“I like writers who try to tell you something truthful,” says the title character of “My Name Is Lucy Barton.”
That’s appropriate, because the extraordinary story she tells — Rona Munro’s adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novella — overflows with truths. About family, love, home, class, memory — and so much more.
On a stage bare except for a hospital bed and chair, a middle-aged Lucy (Maev Beaty) returns to recount something that happened to her years earlier. After a routine appendectomy led to a mysterious infection, she was holed up in a Manhattan hospital for nearly nine weeks. Her husband William has a phobia about hospitals and so doesn’t visit often; her two daughters are being tended by a sitter.
One day she wakes up to find her mother, who’s taken the first plane in her life to fly in from the Midwest, opposite her in the chair, addressing her by her childhood nickname, Wizzle. The two haven’t seen each other in years. Why? We’ll find out, in time.
As Lucy’s mother passes the time by telling stories — most having to do with women they know from their rural town of Amgash, Illinois, who have experienced misfortune — Lucy herself begins to recall details of her own life. She relates most of them to us, the audience, rather than to her mother. She’s obviously learned to keep secrets.
Up until the age of 11, she and her family lived in a garage, moving into an adjoining house only after an uncle died. Dinner is sometimes bread smeared with molasses. She and her siblings are bullied at school because of the way they smell. Her mechanic father remains haunted by his experiences in the Second World War.
Discovering that she can stay after hours at her school, which unlike her home is heated properly, Lucy learns to do her homework there and, though the school itself doesn’t have a library — a quiet, heartbreaking detail — she has access to books. Books, in turn, provide her with escape and eventually, years later, a way out of this town. They also inspire her future vocation as a writer.
All of this is recounted without sentimentality or blame. When Lucy tells us about being so lonely she befriended a tree, or that none of her family attended her wedding, it’s not to elicit pity or sympathy. And some painful experiences are so deeply buried that they need more time to emerge. But they do.
Jackie Maxwell directs this memory play with clarity and sensitivity. Amelia Scott’s hazy projections fill up the back wall of the large Bluma Appel space, suggesting everything from the quick flash of a Manhattan streetscape to the peaceful beauty of an unbroken Midwest harvest. They’re hauntingly reflected on the black lacquered floor in Michael Gianfrancesco’s minimal set. Bonnie Beecher’s lighting and Jacob Lin’s sound design, meanwhile, help evoke Lucy’s shifting emotional journey without ever being obvious.
Maxwell is so masterful in her staging that you’ll leave the theatre thinking there were multiple actors onstage, not just one.
Of course, much of that has to do with Beaty’s tour-de-force performance. Without resorting to caricature or exaggeration, she inhabits both Lucy and her unnamed, prickly mother with complete authority. There’s no condescension in the mother’s gossipy tales or her belief in superstition, all delivered with a convincing Midwest accent you soon realize Lucy has worked very hard to lose (Jane Gooderham is voice and dialect coach).
Beaty is such a powerful actor that even characters Lucy meets, who act as subtle parental substitutes in her life — like an aristocratic Frenchman in her Greenwich Village neighbourhood in the late ’80s, during the height of the AIDS crisis, or a novelist she admires that she randomly meets in a dress shop — come alive vividly. Most effective is her depiction of Lucy’s relationship with her kindly physician, a Holocaust survivor who treats her with more love and respect than her parents ever did.
Not that her parents didn’t love her — that, I think, is one of Strout’s points. We’re given enough about both of Lucy’s parents’ backgrounds to understand that they deal with hardship and feelings in their own ways, often through anger or denial. Even if she can’t respond “I love you, too,” the fact that Lucy’s mother stays with her at all is what you need to know.
The fact that Beaty recently experienced the loss of a parent only adds to the play’s poignancy and her commitment as an artist.
To paraphrase Strout, I like an actor who shows me something truthful. Her name is Maev Beaty.
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