“Irritation has never been given its
full due as a dramatic emotion. You don’t see a mask of irascibility scowling
between the masks of comedy and tragedy. But with the right play… sustained
prickliness can be more affecting than a confrontational scram-off as you wait
anxiously for friction to turn into fire.
Eugene O’Neill’s LONG DAYS’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT is probably the ultimate
example of this phenomenon. But more immediate proof of the same powerful law of
theater is available at Richard Nelson’s RODNEY’S WIFE….
Seeming light conversation scrapes the skins of the characters in this
sharply etched study of dislocation, loneliness ad sexual betrayal…. And you are
always aware of the strain and the snappishness that arise when people politely
avoid saying what is on everyone’s mind. Long before the unspoken is brought out
for airing, Mr Nelson… [has] created a full emotional geography of a family,
with deserts and bogs and patches of quicksand.
Over the last decade Mr Nelson, who has always had more a following in London
than in New York, has laid claim to being American drama’s foremost living
portrayer of what movie advertisements used to refer grandly to as `illicit
passion’. Mr Nelson, however, follows paths of erotic misadventure never mapped
in Peyton Place.
He as at least flirted with several forms of incest and what would legally
quality as pedophilia in MADAME MELVILLE, FRANNY’S WAY and the fearless
GOODNIGHT CHILDREN EVERYWHERE, which won him the Olivier Award in London for
best play. RODNEY’S WIFE manages to come up with yet another variation on the
sexually taboo….
Yet like Mr Nelson’s earlier works, RODNEY’S WIFE is never tainted by
prurience, on the one hand, or puritantical head-shaking, on the other. What Mr
Nelson offers instead is a deep and sorrowful understanding of how much
loneliness there often is in lust. At the same time he has created what may be
the most incisive, unsensationalized portrait of a Hollywood wife ever to grace
a stage.”
Ben Brantley, The New York Times
originally produced by
Williamstown Theater Festival
and then in New York by Playwrights Horizons
3 M, 3 F
I S B N: 0-88145-285-8
$9.95