OH, ART! OH, MEMORY! A TRIBUTE TO LAURIE COLWIN
City Lit Theater Company at the Chicago Cultural Center
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Every once in a while, however, a production comes along that shows why these adaptations have become so popular. Such a show is City Lit’s sublime evening of five stories by the late Laurie Colwin, Oh, Art! Oh, Memory! Kathryn Gallagher (who adapted and directed four of the stories) and Tina Thuerwachter (who adapted and directed one) come very close to realizing Breen’s dream of a hybrid of literature and drama that combines the immediacy and “simultaneity” of drama with fiction’s “narrative privilege”–the ease with which writers of fiction can switch points of view and voices, something not even cinema, with its infinite number of camera angles, can equal.
Of course Colwin’s finely crafted stories helped. Filled as they are with witty narration and vivid, utterly believable characters, they’re virtually ready-made for the stage. With a single economical line, the opening line to “The Achieve of, the Mastery of the Thing”–“Once upon a time, I was Professor Thorne Speizer’s stoned wife, and what a time it was”–she grabs the reader’s attention, then satisfies and even exceeds all expectations over the following 24 pages.
Clearly there must be some hysteria in a play about poor Anne Sexton, who went through nervous breakdowns, suicide attempts, and eventually the breakup of her marriage yet managed to write some pretty amazing poetry before she succeeded in killing herself in 1974. However, three flat-out hysterical scenes are more than enough for any play.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Suzanne Plunkett.
