How it’s New York: “My Name Is Lucy Barton” opened at Manhattan Theatre Club.
How it’s Irish: Laura Linney, who plays the title role, is, according to IMDB, of Irish, Scottish and German descent. The 2016 novel “My Name Is Lucy Barton” was shortlisted for the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award.
Elizabeth Strout’s “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” a novel about a woman in the hospital reconnecting with her estranged mother, was a bestseller when it was published in 2016. It’s a haunting book, a sad and sometimes luminous one, as Lucy, now a successful writer in Manhattan, recalls incidents from a desperately poor and abusive childhood in rural Illinois. Her father was moody and unpredictable, while her mother, who loved her, withheld affection.
Rona Munro adapted the book into a one-woman show, which opened in London in 2018, and at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2020.
Linney, as always, radiates warmth, a down-to-earth kind presence, and a heartbreaking sincerity as she tells Lucy’s stories. It’s hard to explain how the book winds its way into your heart: it begins so simply. Lucy wakes up several weeks into her hospital stay and finds her mother there. Her mother tells her stories of people in town, mostly about women trying to overcome hardships.
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Lucy tells us memories she has, sometimes terrible, sometimes sad. A haunting one is of her father buying a jelly apple at a fair for her, and then, rather than being angry when Lucy could not eat it, ate it himself. The kindness was rare, you see. In the hospital, Lucy reverts to a child begging for her mother’s love.
But what works so seamlessly and elegantly on the page does not translate to the stage. Lucy’s observations about life, so ruminative and insightful, come across as either banal or worse, a little smug, when spoken to the audience. Munro’s adaptation, and Richard Eyre’s direction, wisely avoid the trap of having the actor portray all the different roles. Linney plays Lucy, and Lucy sometimes shows us how her mother talks.
But — that means most of the time we’re just listening. Little happens in front of us. In that way, it’s not at all like the book. When you read a story, your mind conjures it up. That does’t happen when you just hear it. Lucy’s descriptions of the Chrysler building outside her hospital window, for example, set the scene when reading. When we hear about it, it just seems to fill time.
There’s little here that wouldn’t be just as successful with Audible. Even with someone as appealing as Linney’s Lucy.
