![]() ![]() Henry Stram in a scene from “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” Credit. ![]() It’s a mere blueprint of a cathedral, not the majestic building itself. But what’s onstage is a surface sketch of the book, one that fails to communicate any of its emotional substance. The director, Doug Hughes, provides a tasteful frame (the weathered wooden set by Neil Patel is gorgeous), and the cast is solid. ![]() The playwright Rebecca Gilman (“Spinning Into Butter”) has written a workmanlike adaptation that draws directly on the novel’s dialogue and moves through most of its major incidents clearly enough. Sadly, little of the furious feeling that consumes McCullers’s characters has made its way into the respectful but lifeless stage version that opened on Thursday night at New York Theater Workshop, a co-production with the Acting Company. In prose both limpid and tense with feeling she charted the roiling interior lives of an alcoholic choking on social injustice, a black doctor whose high moral vision has alienated his family, an adolescent tomboy with a passion for Mozart, and the mute to whom each turns for companionship. Men and women desperate for communion, all but aflame with a need for understanding, wander the streets of a Southern town in “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” Carson McCullers’s first novel, published in 1940 when she was just 23. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |