| Hills of California last night (MILD SPOILERS) | |
| Last Edit: Delvino 09:53 am EDT 09/18/24 | |
| Posted by: Delvino 09:49 am EDT 09/18/24 | |
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| Saw this last night, and come down in the middle of the reactions I've encountered on the boards. The play ultimately gains genuine power, once its second of three acts burrows deeply into the core event defining the heartbreaking story. Butterworth's ability to shape an overly familiar situation - a stage mother who will sacrifice literally anything for her children's success - into something new and disturbing earns attention and respect. And when the plot turn that changes lives forever happens before our eyes, Mendes stages it without a wisp of melodrama. I found the second act so riveting it made me (almost) forget the long-winded, digressive, and overwritten first - a full hour yet - which stalls, sputters, rewinds, and keeps losing momentum. As for the third act, a bone of contention with many (including British reviews I checked on the way home), I'm not yet sure how I feel about the merely circumstantial irresolution. The play gives a nod to Pinter's The Homecoming and finds fresh turf to explore, to be sure. And Laura Donnelly, channeling a kind of youngish Susan Sarandon, turns a near caricature into a haunted shell of a woman, a human being so emptied of character and agency she is all performative tics, chain smoking in her childhood home to resist taking the needed deep breath that might reconnect her to a past like no other. In that third act - and I won't spoil it - Mendes creates a visual coup de theatre, a single image that epitomizes the play's unsettling origin story and its forever consequences. When it arrives, silent, the set doing the work, we gasp. And if nothing afterward has comparable weight, the play winds down to a sad, frightening place: how do you live with what is impossible to explain, let alone justify? I finally began to forgive the first act - maybe - so shaken was I by the dark corner where Butterworth dares to leave these women. |
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