Review: My Name is Lucy Barton is a seductive, heart-squeeze of a show | Canada Voices

Title: My Name is Lucy Barton

Written by: Elizabeth Strout

Adapted by: Rona Munro

Director: Jackie Maxwell

Starring: Maev Beaty

Company: Canadian Stage

Venue: Bluma Appel Theatre (St. Lawrence Centre)

City: Toronto

Year: To Sunday, Nov. 3, 2024

Critic’s Pick

In Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel, My Name is Lucy Barton, the title character, a fledgling writer, is told by a psychoanalyst friend that an artist must be “ruthless.” Later, Lucy is mentored by a successful author who reiterates that a writer mustn’t protect her subjects, although the author’s own writing is criticized for having “a softness of compassion.”

Is it possible to write with unsparing honesty but still be compassionate? It’s what Lucy ends up achieving in describing her complex relationship with her mother – which forms the core both of Strout’s bestselling novel and of Rona Munro’s moving 2018 dramatization, currently playing at Canadian Stage.

This is a gentle heart-squeeze of a show, a monologue of disarming candour, troubling evasions and great tenderness, delivered here thrillingly by Maev Beaty in a subtly seductive production from director Jackie Maxwell.

We meet Beaty’s Lucy as an older woman, sporting a purple-shaded pantsuit and a light Midwestern accent. She wants to tell us about a time, back in the 1980s, when she was a young wife and mother living in New York and went into the hospital for a routine appendectomy, which spiralled into a mysterious illness that kept her there for nearly nine weeks.

One afternoon, she woke up to find her mother, whom she hadn’t seen in years, seated near the foot of her bed.

Lucy, who is lonely, is overjoyed to see her, even though her mother left much to be desired as a parent. Her mother seems to tacitly recognize that. Instead of talking about their past, a dire life of rural poverty in a backwater called Amgash, Ill., she entertains her daughter with gossip about local people they knew. These tales invariably involve marriages, broken or blighted, and begin to sound like veiled lessons about women who foolishly aspired for more.

Lucy’s own “off-kilter” family was looked down upon even within this humble community. Her father was a farm mechanic, her mother took in sewing and, until Lucy was 11, they lived in an unheated garage. Lucy’s memories of their miserable life, the lack of food and warmth, and the routine abuse she and her siblings suffered at their mother’s hand, are shot through with a child’s helpless desperation. There are incidents she can barely describe without shuddering even now, as well as a recurring one, which she calls “the Thing” – dark episodes with her father, a PTSD-suffering Second World War vet – that she is only able to hint at.

Yet despite that, or because of it, Lucy retains the need for her mother’s love. That isn’t easily prised from a woman who has never told her “I love you,” and yet Lucy treats her with affection anyway. As she portrays her in her hospital visit – and as Beaty vividly embodies her, broadening the Midwestern accent, sprinkling her voice with gravel and sharpening her facial expressions – Lucy’s mother has a tough, rustic stoicism and fierce pride, but also an innate sense of humour. The way she tells them, her cautionary tales are as funny as they are sad.

Strout, best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge (thanks to the HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand), writes in a deceptively simple prose that seems meant to be spoken. Munro, the Scottish playwright whose own work includes the bravura James Plays trilogy (seen here at the 2016 Luminato Festival), has created an artfully edited adaptation that looses none of the essentials. In fact, her compression brings some of the novel’s themes into sharper focus, including the traumas of successive generations, scarred by a world war, the AIDS crisis, the 9-11 attacks.

Laura Linney originated the role of Lucy in the play’s London-New York production and, while I didn’t see her performance, Beaty is certainly an actor of Linney’s calibre. Under Maxwell’s careful direction, she does a superb job of capturing Lucy’s distinctive narrative voice, by turns precise and exuberant, and illuminates it with flashes of comedy that we may have missed on the page.

Maxwell’s staging is quietly powerful. Michael Gianfrancesco’s basic set – a hospital bed and a chair – is backed by a projection design from Amelia Scott that fills the Bluma Appel Theatre’s wide stage with a succession of images blurred as if by distant memory. They range from the Manhattan skyscrapers outside Lucy’s hospital window to the green farmland of the Illinois countryside, whose beauty was among her few childhood consolations. And, in one harrowing scene, they evoke a rain-pebbled windshield, suggesting Lucy’s terrified tears when, as a small child, she was regularly locked away for the day in her father’s truck.

Bonnie Beecher’s delicately expressive lighting and Jacob Lin’s near-subliminal sound design, which softly swells during the more dramatic moments, add to the contemplative feeling of a woman revisiting and reassessing her life.

Lucy eventually sees her friend’s recommended ruthlessness as the quality that has driven her to leave behind her past and bravely pursue her vocation as a writer. But it’s the compassion, the moments when she seeks to show or understand the hurt suffered by her parents, allied with her belief that you can never know anyone fully, which win us over as listeners. A woman who grew up starved for love, Lucy Barton now has a huge capacity to give it, and if that is “softness,” the world needs more of it.

In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)