"An untethered play about unmoored lives...Throughout this production, directed a shade too tentatively by Lynne Meadow, Ms. Lavin’s poses unfailingly match, and even amplify, Mr. Greenberg’s exquisite prose...I wish the play that surrounds her were more compellingly realized...As a mystery drama, 'Our Mother’s Brief Affair' never acquires much urgency, despite the fretful, fine-grained ambivalence of all the performances."
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"Greenberg’s writing is elegant and keenly epigrammatic...'Our Mother’s Brief Affair' leaves you to wonder how much this scandal has been retouched. But there is no doubt as to the casual mastery that Lavin, at 78, brings to the part. Shifting in and out of the past, elevating one-liners to three-dimensionality, she brings a lifetime of command to the stage."
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"The moral balance fails, making 'Our Mother’s Brief Affair' seem uncharacteristically cheap or desperate, a way of cribbing drama from an impeccable source — history — instead of growing it natively. Greenberg seems to sense this, or at least his characters do, because he and they spend the rest of the play scrambling to absorb the blow by making excuses where possible and, where not, trying to top it with a secondary secret."
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"Mr. Greenberg has engaged with his material in an unequivocally personal way this time around...While the results are flawed, I was never bored and some parts are quite moving…Unfortunately, 'Our Mother’s Brief Affair' slithers off the track at midpoint...It runs for two hours and would be far stronger had it been cut to an intermission-free hour and a half...It is, however, very well staged by Lynne Meadow and persuasively acted by all hands."
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"With signature style, wry wit and an irresistible glint in her eye, Lavin makes Anna Cantor a force to be reckoned with. Lavin can do that in her sleep. Even so, the play is a snooze...Greenberg writes sharp and smart dialogue. Lynne Meadow is an efficient director. The cast is fine, but can only do so much with a script that is undercooked and overwritten at the same time."
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"Not even the sainted Linda Lavin can save the deeply unpleasant character she plays in 'Our Mother’s Brief Affair,' a lazy play by Richard Greenberg. Stubbornly lacking in dramatic tension, the uneventful narrative features a mean-spirited woman who may or may not be on her deathbed, recounting a closely held secret to her disagreeable grown children."
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"It takes some doing to stifle the prickly humor of Linda Lavin, but 'Our Mother's Brief Affair' makes her character both an unreliable narrator and one who's astringent to the point of unpleasantness...While Meadow's actors are all quite accomplished, they struggle to find any heart in characters so unrelentingly 'written' that it sucks the life out of them, giving us no reason to care."
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"The play has two things going for it. In addition to the revelation inherent in discovering Ms. Lavin’s extensive gifts, there is the lively art of playwright Richard Greenberg...It’s a winning combination. This is not his most flawless play…It’s an extravagant ruse, bogged down in contrived exposition, that doesn’t quite work. Richard Greenberg always amazes with his precise selection of words and images, and Linda Lavin serves him well."
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