What do you give an audience after The Goat, Edward Albee’s 2002 Tony winner about a prize-winning architect sexually bewitched by an animal? Lyric Stage Company of Boston honcho Spiro Veloudos’s mind wandered sagely from the barnyard to the boathouse of Lanford Wilson’s 1980 Pulitzer Prize winner Talley’s Folly (through April 22), which one of its two characters accurately describes in the first few minutes as “a waltz, one-two-three, one-two-three, a no-holds-barred romantic story.” And it’s set in 1944, when bestiality was not on the romantic agenda.
Talley’s Folly is the second play in the Talley trilogy, which Wilson set in his home town of Lebanon, Missouri. Its spur was to provide a back story for the eccentric Sally Talley Friedman of Fifth of July, which had debuted the year before. Set in 1977, Fifth of July centers on gay disabled vet Kenny Talley and treads the troubling wake of Vietnam. The third play, Talley and Son, takes place concurrently with Talley’s Folly in the “house on the hill” from which spinster Sal has briefly escaped to the boathouse of the title, a run-down architectural valentine where she made love with interloping St. Louis Jewish accountant Matt Friedman the year before and where, after a year of writing her unanswered letters, he hopes now to penetrate her spiritual rather than her sexual defenses. In an Our Town–like opening monologue, Matt tells the audience he has just 97 minutes, the play’s running time, to persuade the self-protective Sally to take a chance on love as America, not without trepidation, prepares to move from war to the imminent “danger of prosperity.”
Talley’s Folly is an unabashedly sweet play, though with the grain of Turbinado sugar rather than the cloyingness of saccharine. Matt and Sally are a pair of prickly loners who look as askance on trust as they do on Sally’s wealthy, prejudiced, Protestant relatives. Matt tells of a man who describes human beings as eggs keeping their distance from one another lest they crack their shells and ooze like Humpty Dumpty. Matt is making a game attempt to leap from the egg carton into the frying pan with Sally, but both characters have issues with intimacy that are bound up in the life stories the one-time golden girl and the displaced European Jew eventually extract from each other like teeth. This leads to an ending that echoes The Gift of the Magi, albeit with the characters’ losses dovetailing rather conveniently.
Balancing the feistiness and old-fashioned lyricism of Talley’s Folly requires skill, and that’s provided in Adam Zahler’s production, which skates on a crust of tenderness without putting a foot through the floor into a swamp of schmaltz. The role of Matt, written for Judd Hirsch, is described by Wilson as “this big, sexy, clumsy Jew coming from St. Louis down to Lebanon, Missouri, where nobody had ever seen a Jew before.” And that’s exactly what bearded Stephen Russell, in his bright short tie and snug brown suit, suggests: the strong Semitic geek as romantic hero, telling his awkward jokes but staying the course. And Marianna Bassham is a lovely, guarded spitfire of a Sally — a woman fired from the Sunday School faculty for espousing socialism but, when it comes to opening herself up to an unconventional love, as professedly prim as a preacher’s wife. The way in which Bassham lets Sally’s smart-ass verve and sensuality spill out almost by accident is charming. So is Wilson’s play, which captures its restrictive, expectant era with nostalgia but no mothballs.
