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has the most obvious answer.
Everything about programming the one-woman performance in Manhattan Theatre Clubs Samuel J. Friedman Theatre seems canny.
Recent figures tell us that 68 percent of Broadway audiences are women.
The average age is 42.
And what do 40-muffled-sound-year-old women want?
We want rueful stories about mothers and daughters!
We want Elizabeth Strout novels!
We want Laura Linney!
YetMy Name Is Lucy Bartonflops.
It doesnt flop hard with its limited ambition, it has no height from which to fall.
But it does collapse.
Twenty minutes in, every card in its deck is already on the table.
Strouts book is brief; you seem to read it in a single held breath.
That particular sensation of private suspension and emotional reservation, though, requires true quiet.
(Books are conspiracies between the writer and the single reader.)
She tries to interest her mother in her life, and she fails.
She tries to get her to talk about her fathers traumatic and traumatizing behavior, and shes rebuffed.
Her doctor touches her forehead, and Lucy says she wept with gratitude at his kindness.
Laura Linney plays Lucy, as she did twice already at the Bridge Theatre in London.
Its effectiveness might depend on our being closer.
Near the end, when she says the simple title line shes bravely glum.
Its this sameness thats the show-killer.
Dramatic mechanics are made to be tampered with have at it!
Strouts book is atmospheric, full of silence and self-questioning.
Loving gestures are guessed at and hoped for but never quite made; it vibrates with things left undone.
Yet this immensely static production uses the same words to be plodding, expository, clear.
In the novel, the narrator, an author herself, watches another writer speak.
By this point in the book, were several meta-levels down.
The seeming difference, though, is a backstory of horrifying privation, poverty, and abuse.
Oh, what challenge and warning is in that line!
With the book in our hands, we know were in contact with the author.
At least the show offers the occasion for a lot of productive thinking.
What makes something adaptable?
What commands our interest?
How do we respond to the single body onstage?
You …could also just get the existing audiobook instead of the audiodramatic adaptation.
But perhaps infinite recursion is your thing?
Your name might be Lucy Barton too.
