Subject: Fwd: Franny's Way
From: Rob Riss (sdrelist@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Apr 02 2002 - 16:01:08 EST
here's the article from the NY times -
-rob
>From: sdrelist@hotmail.com
>Reply-To: sdrelist@hotmail.com
>To: sdrelist@hotmail.com
>Subject: NYTimes.com Article: A Summer That Melted Conventions
>Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2002 15:54:20 -0500 (EST)
>
>This article from NYTimes.com
>has been sent to you by sdrelist@hotmail.com.
>
>
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>
>A Summer That Melted Conventions
>
>March 28, 2002
>
>By BEN BRANTLEY
>
>
>
>
>Boundaries warp and melt in the dense urban heat that
>pervades "Franny's Way," Richard Nelson's sensitively drawn
>portrait of love in the age of J. D. Salinger. The lines
>between childhood and adulthood blur disorientingly for the
>three generations of characters gathered in a cramped
>apartment in Greenwich Village at the height of summer in
>the 1950's.
>
>Roles and responsibilities that once seemed comfortably
>assured are suddenly fractured. Erotic energy slips from
>the reins of convention. Alliances among five family
>members keep reconfiguring themselves. No one, in other
>words, is quite sure anymore what the rules for behavior
>are.
>
>New York City does seem to have that effect on people,
>doesn't it? But the landscape in which "Franny's Way"
>occurs isn't peculiar to Manhattan, although that hothouse
>island serves the play's purposes very well.
>
>Mr. Nelson has mapped similiar territory in the Paris of
>"Madame Melville" and the London of "Goodnight Children
>Everywhere," his most recent works. The setting in these
>plays, too, is an anarchic world where adolescent conflict
>and anxiety seem the norm, even among so-called grown-ups.
>
>"Franny's Way," which opened Tuesday night at the Atlantic
>Theater in a Playwrights Horizons production, reaffirms Mr.
>Nelson's distinctive gifts as a creator of memory plays
>that sting. Like "Madame Melville," "Franny's Way" assumes
>a traditional theatrical form, made popular by "The Glass
>Menagerie," in which adult narrators look back on their
>younger selves in life-changing moments.
>
>Within this comfortingly well-worn structure, however, Mr.
>Nelson is again exploring a shadowy sexuality with which
>some theatergoers may not be entirely at ease. As directed
>by its author, "Franny's Way" is a wry, rueful and
>forgiving look at the ways people turn to one another for
>solace when they feel they have lost their bearings.
>
>The events of the play are framed by the perspective of its
>title character, who in her early 60's recalls herself at
>17 on a visit to New York with her younger sister and
>grandmother. (Kathleen Widdoes portrays the older Franny
>and Marjorie, the grandmother of her memories, while
>Elisabeth Moss is the younger Franny.)
>
>As designed by Thomas Lynch, the apartment of Franny's
>cousin Sally (Yvonne Woods) and her husband, Phil (Jess
>Pennington), is steeped in the glamorous shabbiness of
>living young and adventurously in Greenwich Village. You
>can understand why Ms. Moss's character, who has recently
>changed her name from Frances to Franny in homage to Mr.
>Salinger's fabled heroine, would see the place as a
>personal mecca.
>
>But the atmosphere is also charged with a jagged grief.
>Sally and Phil lost their infant daughter to crib death
>only weeks before Franny's visit. They discovered their
>dead child shortly after making love in the middle of the
>night and, as Sally is quick to inform Marjorie, Phil has
>not touched her since.
>
>Other elements - arguably too many for a 90-minute play -
>add to the tension. Franny and her 15-year-old sister,
>Dolly (Domenica Cameron-Scorsese), have each made
>surreptitious plans for a rendezvous in the city. Franny
>has arranged to meet her boyfriend (and first lover), a
>student at New York University, while Dolly is determined
>to hook up with their long-absent mother, who left the
>girls' father for another man.
>
>This convergence of private schemes and sorrows borders on
>the soap-opera-ish. But Mr. Nelson and his cast resist
>melodrama, trading instead in the accumulation of small
>tensions of people in crisis who are pretending that things
>are as usual.
>
>The production makes wonderful use of the feelings of
>exoticism and openness experienced by visitors to
>Manhattan. The noise of traffic and distant jazz music
>(Scott Lehrer is the sound desinger) and the apartment's
>views of sidewalk drama create a sense of a world without
>walls, both painfully exposed and liberatingly permissive.
>
>For even Phil and Sally are relative newcomers to this
>jangling, dazzling environment. They are also, as Sally
>points out, not many years older than their teenage
>cousins. Accordingly, all the characters, except Marjorie,
>are striving for a sophistication that eludes them. Phil
>and Franny discover a bond in their passion for Mr.
>Salinger's contemporary tales of the Glass family. "For
>me," Phil says, describing a scene of unconventional family
>life from one of those stories, "that's New York."
>
>In fact, Mr. Nelson's play is closer in tone to the works
>of another writer for The New Yorker, the great Alice
>Munro, than to Mr. Salinger's studies in intellectual
>eccentricity. Like Ms. Munro, Mr. Nelson is a keen-eyed
>observer of the pretensions, sexual competitiveness and the
>self-centered cruelty in being young that haunts the memory
>years later.
>
>This vision doesn't always translate gracefully to the
>stage in "Franny's Way." There's an inevitable mustiness
>about the retrospective narration, for example. (The same
>device was handled better in "Madame Melville.") But Mr.
>Nelson's deliberately awkward dialogue often operates on
>several levels at once, turning back on the person who
>speaks it.
>
>Listen, for example, to Sally's sharp admonition to Franny:
>"I see who you are, and who you think you are, and there's
>a big discrepancy, my dear." The observation is just, about
>both Franny and Sally; the voice is devastatingly phony,
>that of a girl playing matron.
>
>The cast members embody their characters' abiding
>discomfort and prickliness with admirable grace. Ms.
>Widdoes, too long absent from the New York stage, is a
>charmingly discreet guide to Franny's world. As the
>sisters, Ms. Moss and Ms. Cameron-Scorsese (daughter of the
>director Martin Scorsese) mix defensive malice and
>vulnerability in telling measures. You're always aware of
>the two girls wanting both to cling to and to eviscerate
>each other.
>
>And the high-strung but contained performances of Ms. Woods
>and Mr. Pennington remind you that tragedy generally leaves
>people less ennobled than simply stunned and confused.
>
>In the prologue that begins the evening, Sally and Phil are
>seen naked in their darkened apartment, looking rather like
>lovers by Bonnard, the painter Mr. Nelson evoked in "Madame
>Melville." They have just had sex, and they are about to
>discover that their child is dead. A sensual idyll is on
>the edge of smashing into horror.
>
>The scene turns out to be a perfect preface for the study
>in guilt, longing and bewilderment that follows. Sex, as
>the interplay among the characters gently and insistently
>reminds you, may be a primal drive, but it doesn't always
>follow a straight course. Mr. Nelson continues to give
>compassionate and insightful life to such erotic
>waywardness.
>
>FRANNY'S WAY
>
>Written and directed by Richard Nelson; sets by Thomas
>Lynch; costumes by Susan Hilferty and Linda Ross; lighting
>by Jennifer Tipton; sound by Scott Lehrer; director of
>development, Jill Garland; production manager, Christopher
>Boll; production stage manager, Jane Pole. Presented by
>Playwrights Horizons, Tim Sanford, artistic director;
>Leslie Marcus, managing director; William Russo, general
>manager. At the Atlantic Theater, 336 West 20th Street,
>Chelsea.
>
>WITH: Kathleen Widdoes (Older Franny and Marjorie),
>Elisabeth Moss (Young Franny, age 17), Domenica
>Cameron-Scorsese (Dolly), Yvonne Woods (Sally) and Jesse
>Pennington (Phil).
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/28/arts/theater/28FRAN.html?ex=1018780860&ei=1&en=cb8d081e5b4ab6b3
>
>
>
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>Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
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