Review: Julie-Anne McDowell glows as a feisty, spunky and brave My Name is Lucy Barton

My Name Is Lucy Barton is set in a hospital room in New York with Lucy Barton who hasn’t seen her mom for years. Her mother arrives at her hospital bed and they have an intense conversation over five days. It’s a beautifully nuanced story which reverberates around relationships between mothers and daughters, family, family trauma, guilt, shame, identity, juggling creative pursuits with family and other responsibilities and how nebulous memory is when looking back at the past.  This review contains plot spoilers.

Lucy Barton has physically transcended impoverished circumstance of her family home in in the sticks in Amgash Illinois. She marries and has two daughters, becomes sophisticated and stylish. In the process, she becomes disconnected from her family. But as we see so vividly in the play, the ties that connect family are strong. Never mind the resentment, anger, despair, pain between Lucy and her mom, they are able to re-connect – through memory and the sharing of stories. It is a pause – beautiful pause of connection.

Lucy’s mom has remorse, guilt and shame about the fact that they were so poor. But she doesn’t engage with the issues of abuse in the story and spends her time, gossiping about other peoples’ lives. That is her way of coping. The humour in the story is a much needed release from the terrors of some of the memories that Lucy navigates and her own sense of feeling alone, cut off from her daughters and husband in single hospital room.

“You did it”, says Lucy’s mom, acknowledging Lucy’s achievements. Lucy is resolute that she had to be “ruthless” in making a life, away from her family. Despite the success of her adult life, she still feels alone and has her own guilt about leaving. Lucy’s loneliness and anxiety is lifted by her mom’s magical presence.

It is the magical which drives this play, adapted by Rona Munro from the award winning book, My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. The play is a stand-alone work and if you haven’t read the book, it doesn’t matter but I have read the book, several times and I was delighted by this staging. In the book, Lucy Barton came across for me as rather self-effacing and somewhat meek. There was a kind of “aww shucks” sense (not that she expressed it like that in the book), in how she navigated from Illinois to a sophisticate in a New York trench coat and stiletto heels. In this production, Julie–Anne McDowell owns Lucy Barton. Lucy is luminescent and glows as feisty and spunky. The bravery of Lucy is evidenced in the book but in the play, in this production, the bravery is heightened and inspirational.

McDowell delivers a consummate performing, prowling around the stage from hospital bed to the chair where her mom sits for five days. The physical performance ensures that it is never static which is not easy to do in a one person play, which is essentially a monologue.  Kudos to Charmaine Weir-Smith’s direction in keeping the pace revved up at a clip, despite the elegiac subject matter.  McDowell’s New York accent is charming and beguiling. I was capitated.

Coming across poignantly in My Name is Lucy Barton is how we are irrevocably shaped by our pasts. The past lingers like a palimpsest for Lucy as she does an audit of her life trying to process the choices she has made. She must face the abuse – emotional and physical – in the family. Her father dealt with his own ghosts and he took it out on his offspring, particularly on Lucy’s brother.

But was it so bad, Lucy ponders? Memory is fluid and I think what comes across so strongly in this play, in this production is how important it is to embrace the moment and live meaningfully. Lucy seizes her mom’s presence as a gift. Her unbridled joy comes across palpably. The take-home is that life is complicated and painful but there are moments of connection to hold onto and cherish.  There is something very beautiful in that.

My Name is Lucy Barton in South Africa 2024 is an aspirational and uplifting story and makes for compelling theatre. The pared down set with hospital bed, chair, bedside table and lamp (production design by Kieran McGregor) enhances the luminosity of McDowelI’s channelling of Lucy on stage.  I loved the bedside lamp which glows intermittingly and the interplay with the images of the New York skyline and the Chrysler Building, which are screened onto to the curtain in the hospital room. This is Lucy’s window into the world- light and dark, shadows; sorrows and joys and happy moments. My Name is Lucy Barton, the play, South Africa 2024, is a very special piece of theatre.

✳ Julie-Anne McDowell in the 2024 South African production, stage adaption of My Name is Lucy Barton. Images by Daniel Rutland Manners. Supplied. Related coverage on the TCR: https://thecaperobyn.co.za/interview-staging-my-name-is-lucy-barton-in-south-africa/