Strout’s novel and Munro’s adaptation share a sustained concern with how one tells the story of a life. The title character is a writer. She grew up in a poor household without access to the world beyond the cornfields of Illinois until her belated entry into schooling introduced the wonders of books. Lucy is drawn to storytelling as a means of processing trauma: she and her siblings were abused by their parents, by turns beaten and neglected.
Lucy escaped this misery and moved to New York City, where she started a family of her own as she built her writing career. But when she woke up one day in the middle of a protracted hospital stay to find her mother sitting next to her, her past and present collided, offering an opportunity for reconciliation and perhaps redemption. This, we learn as Lucy relates the story to us, was never fully achieved. What remains is displacement and deferral, the dissatisfaction of the unsaid. Through it all, however, Lucy does tell her story, and emerges from it with a clarity that she calls “ruthless” but that is actually kind to herself and others.
A play like this lands differently in 2024, not least because the unfortunate return of Donald Trump accompanied by his running mate JD Vance is a reminder of the ways in which the “Middle America versus coastal cities” narrative has been recruited into the manufactured culture war driving political discourse in the US.
Lucy Barton’s story gives the lie to the Rust Belt/Corn Belt/Hillbilly grievance on which a figure like Vance has traded, partly because it shows that poverty and related social ills in the US are not “recent” phenomena — Lucy’s traumatised father was a veteran of World War 2 — but also because it refuses to allow deprivation to be weaponised into hatred.
In the SA context, we are rightly cautious of assumptions about abuse and neglect in disadvantaged communities. Yet ours, too, is a society full of Lucy Bartons: children raised in broken homes, now thriving adults and parents themselves, who nonetheless long for healing and resolution, who must accept that their relationships with their parents will never be made whole.
McDowell’s performance in this production, under the direction of Charmaine Weir-Smith, is a fine achievement indeed. On a sparse set (a hospital bed and a chair, with projected backdrops of the New York skyline and the Illinois cornfields), she conjures the full landscape of Lucy’s life and its accompanying emotional repertoire: a lively and even garrulous manner covering deep sadness and loneliness, with repressed anger and fear bursting through in terrifying but cathartic moments.
Transitions between the voices of mother and daughter are deftly handled, and McDowell stirs our sympathy for both. Their relationship is, in some ways, the inverse of that portrayed by McDowell and Jennifer Steyn in How Now Brown Cow’s production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane. And, unlike Maureen, the daughter figure in Martin McDonagh’s bleak comedy, Lucy Barton ends her story on a quietly triumphant note.
• ‘My Name is Lucy Barton’ is at the Theatre on the Square in Sandton from October 9-27.
This article originally appeared in Business Day.
Culture
CHRIS THURMAN: Life and times of Lucy Barton
Julie-Anne McDowell has brought the play to SA in a new production that opens in Johannesburg this week
Image: Daniel Rutland Manners
Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel My Name is Lucy Barton was adapted for the stage by Rona Munro and premiered as a one-woman play starring Laura Linney in London two years later. The show opened on Broadway in January 2020, during those curious pre-Covid months we now all look back on thinking: if only we’d known what was coming.
The global theatre industry was decimated over the next two years — and SA’s arts and culture sector, especially hard hit, took a long time to recover. But good things were also born during that period; one of them was theatre company How Now Brown Cow, which has since produced a number of plays and the short film The Hive, while developing new scripts through its Writers’ Collective.
So it seems fitting that How Now Brown Cow founder Julie-Anne McDowell should bring Lucy Barton’s story to SA audiences, taking the baton from Linney in a new production of the play opening in Johannesburg this week.
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Strout’s novel and Munro’s adaptation share a sustained concern with how one tells the story of a life. The title character is a writer. She grew up in a poor household without access to the world beyond the cornfields of Illinois until her belated entry into schooling introduced the wonders of books. Lucy is drawn to storytelling as a means of processing trauma: she and her siblings were abused by their parents, by turns beaten and neglected.
Lucy escaped this misery and moved to New York City, where she started a family of her own as she built her writing career. But when she woke up one day in the middle of a protracted hospital stay to find her mother sitting next to her, her past and present collided, offering an opportunity for reconciliation and perhaps redemption. This, we learn as Lucy relates the story to us, was never fully achieved. What remains is displacement and deferral, the dissatisfaction of the unsaid. Through it all, however, Lucy does tell her story, and emerges from it with a clarity that she calls “ruthless” but that is actually kind to herself and others.
A play like this lands differently in 2024, not least because the unfortunate return of Donald Trump accompanied by his running mate JD Vance is a reminder of the ways in which the “Middle America versus coastal cities” narrative has been recruited into the manufactured culture war driving political discourse in the US.
Lucy Barton’s story gives the lie to the Rust Belt/Corn Belt/Hillbilly grievance on which a figure like Vance has traded, partly because it shows that poverty and related social ills in the US are not “recent” phenomena — Lucy’s traumatised father was a veteran of World War 2 — but also because it refuses to allow deprivation to be weaponised into hatred.
In the SA context, we are rightly cautious of assumptions about abuse and neglect in disadvantaged communities. Yet ours, too, is a society full of Lucy Bartons: children raised in broken homes, now thriving adults and parents themselves, who nonetheless long for healing and resolution, who must accept that their relationships with their parents will never be made whole.
McDowell’s performance in this production, under the direction of Charmaine Weir-Smith, is a fine achievement indeed. On a sparse set (a hospital bed and a chair, with projected backdrops of the New York skyline and the Illinois cornfields), she conjures the full landscape of Lucy’s life and its accompanying emotional repertoire: a lively and even garrulous manner covering deep sadness and loneliness, with repressed anger and fear bursting through in terrifying but cathartic moments.
Transitions between the voices of mother and daughter are deftly handled, and McDowell stirs our sympathy for both. Their relationship is, in some ways, the inverse of that portrayed by McDowell and Jennifer Steyn in How Now Brown Cow’s production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane. And, unlike Maureen, the daughter figure in Martin McDonagh’s bleak comedy, Lucy Barton ends her story on a quietly triumphant note.
• ‘My Name is Lucy Barton’ is at the Theatre on the Square in Sandton from October 9-27.
This article originally appeared in Business Day.
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