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Tender mercenaries

By CAROLYN CLAY  |  June 10, 2009

Wilson's pitch-perfect production unfolds in the living and dining environs of the home depicted at the center of a bucolic scene on the scrim that delineates the proscenium built into what is usually Hartford's thrust stage. Jeff Cowie's set, with its pillars and lattice and worn upholstery prints, conjures faded gracious living, and John Gromada's hymn-based sound design contributes to the down-home mood. The performances marry sweetness to satire, with actress Foote's Tony-nominated turn the most daringly broad. Playwright Foote, with his gift for capturing simpler times awash in human complexity, may be gone, but thanks to the small-town Lone Star Forsyte Saga stretched across the canvas of his 60 interrelated plays, the story of the particular, peculiar region that held him in its thrall for most of the 20th century lives on, well and perceptively told.

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Related: Play by play: March 6, 2009, Review: ASP's The Duchess of Malfi, Nora's The Cherry Orchard, My two Dads, More more >
  Topics: Theater , Entertainment, Performing Arts, Theater,  More more >
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ARTICLES BY CAROLYN CLAY
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  •   NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN  |  December 01, 2009
    Louis de Rougemont makes James Frey look like a documentarian. A sickly Victorian lad who arose from his cot, knocked around the Southern Hemisphere for a while, and returned to England with a hifalutin new moniker and captivating tales of seafaring perils and aboriginal idylls, he was the subject of a popular serialized autobiography.
  •   LINCOLN YULE LOG  |  November 24, 2009
    Abraham Lincoln, as he said in his second inaugural address, yearned to "bind up the nation's wounds." Since the great man was assassinated little more than a month later, he didn't quite get around to it. No worry, Paula Vogel has taken over the job with A Civil War Christmas: An American Musical Celebration.
  •   DODGING DEATH  |  November 18, 2009
    Even the sweetest life can shatter in an instant, sending you through the looking glass like Alice. For the euphoric heroine of Craig Lucas's 1988 fable of holiday festivity and arbitrary mayhem, Reckless the moment of reckoning comes when her husband tearfully confesses, on Christmas Eve, that he has taken out a contract on her life.
  •   MARS VS. VENUS  |  October 28, 2009
    It’s been 21 years since Speed-the-Plow first milked the cravenness of Hollywood and the self-described “whores” who turn its celluloid tricks. But David Mamet’s scathing, staccato comedy has held up at least as well as Madonna, who made her Broadway debut in the original 1988 production.
  •   ONLY CONNECT  |  October 20, 2009
    Usually when a cell phone goes off in the theater, you want to kill someone. In the case of Dead Man’s Cell Phone , that’s not necessary.

 See all articles by: CAROLYN CLAY

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