“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 1950s.
...Mr Nelson is again exploring a shadowy sexuality with which some
theatergoers may not be entirely at ease.
...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. 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.”
Ben Brantley, The New York Times
“...one of the deftest achievements of Nelson's taut script is his
crafting a dialogue of indirection. Hurts and jealousies roil beneath petty
arguments over hogging time in the bathroom. Primal longings for affection well
up in comments about the steamy jazz wafting in from a club beneath the window.”
Alisa Solomon, Village Voice
first produced by Playwrights Horizons, New York
1 M, 4 F
I S B N 0-88145-216-5 $7.95