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We gave him a B +
The playwright and filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan has forged over the past decades the reputation of being a kind of master miniaturist, a discerning chronicler of small highlights. His characters rarely live lives on large surfaces; instead, they speak, snake, and double their backs, seeking out ordinary truths and throwing themselves, one way or another, on the deepest.
The Waverly Gallery never builds enough to the emotional power of his most memorable screen work, as You can count on me and Manchester by the Sea; his stakes are lower, his humor calmer and his tragedies less heartbreaking. But she has a cast of movie stars – and a living legend in good faith, in Elaine May – as well as a discreet and humorous melancholy whose impact accumulates over time. of the room.
May is Gladys Green, the kind of woman you can say who lived a lot more than 80 years before age and the time started to slow her down. She lives in an Indian village in Greenwich (there are still drug traffickers in the corners, and people say "analyst", not "therapist"), where she's long retired from the bar and now runs a gallery. Art on the ground floor of a small hotel that seems to mostly function as a comfortable extension of its living room.
This is technically a business, although most visitors are members of his own family: his daughter Ellen (Joan Allen); Howard, Ellen's affable husband (David Cromer); and his grandson Daniel (Lucas Hedges). At least they know who they are: "We are atheist liberal Upper West Side Jewish intellectuals," Daniel explains wearily, to a budding young artist named Don Bowman. "And we really like German choral music."
Don, played by Michael Cera in natural-toned anoraks with a slight suggestion of a mustache, came from New England to chase the dream of the New York painters, and Gladys forced him to place it almost immediately on the walls of New York. the gallery. But his mind slips a little more each day; at first, she does not remember names or facts, and she tends to ask the same questions again and again, kindly. Does Ellen prepare their dinner tonight? (Yes, as she always does) Does Daniel like his job at the newspaper? (In fact, it's the EPA.) Can she offer a treat to the dog? (Never, she still needs to lose weight.) Soon, however, her forgetfulness begins to bloom into total madness, passing from a minor annoyance to some kind of family emergency situation. In progress.
May look too disconcerting. it is so small and fragile, almost translucent. But the strength of her personality has not diminished to the end: Helen may not know where she is or why her grandson seems so annoyed to answer him at 3 am, but she wants live. Hedges – who periodically breaks the fourth wall to fill the audience – and Allen inhabit their parts with a tender and lived naturalism.
Cera who feels mainly lost in his role; he may be there to serve as a witness, since he is never quite alive like his own character. Lonergan seems more committed to finding the perverse fear, resentment and humor associated with caring for an elderly parent and all the ways people manage, or not, with this that they can not control. This does not make for the most propulsive drama on stage, but Waverly instead proposes something else: an indelible study of humanity, discreetly heartbreaking, about mortality and family love. B +
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