cover photo by William B Carter
“The title of Richard
Nelson's unsettling new play is deliberately misleading.
East-West politics do, however, provide the backdrop and premise
of the play:... It concerns the experience of a Czech couple
forced for political reasons to emigrate to New York. The
problems they face in exile, Nelson suggests, have as much to do
with the residual gap between America and Europe as with that
between East and West. But the focus is on the conflict between Gregor and Erna, the two exiles, themselves. In his careful study
of their relationship, Nelson reminds us that power and freedom
cannot be understood in purely political terms.”
Sally Laird, Times Literary
Supplement
“Its subject
is homesickness: that love which cannot bear to speak its name because it's more
private than any other emotion. The setting is a one-room flat in New York, but
the real setting is the no-man's land between the home they lost and the one
they'll never really find....I liked this painful, moving, compassionate play; I
liked the way it stated its point obliquely, but with a hard, unsentimental
edge. I liked its wise humor, and its shrewd sense of what it's like to be
middle-aged, uprooted, resentful, determined, and difficult.”
John Peter, London Sunday
Times
U S premiere: Yale Repertory Theater; London: Hampstead Theatre Club
1 M, 1 F
I S B N: 0-88145-077-4
$8.95