Laura Linney a standout in 'Time Stands Still' — a new Broadway play from the media age
Laura Linney is war photographer Sarah in "Time Stands Still," a Manhattan Theatre Club production at the Friedman Theatre.
THEATER REVIEW
NEW YORK — In the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, there seemed to be more journalists than help. And in this new media order, many of these journalists weren't just armed with notepads and cameras. Many were celebrities with the clout to order up a Medivac. Some were even doctors, inevitably caught between the act of recording and the moral imperative of offering practical help, off-camera.
Donald Margulies' new Broadway play “Time Stands Still,” fixates on an old journalism-school dilemma: Can recording human suffering to tell the world morally suffice for doing nothing in the moment to stop it? More originally, this piece also hones in one of the causes célèbre of the troubled journalistic moment: the financial and societal pressures that keep war and famine-zone coverage off the page (or at least cut to shreds), while making room for profitable celebrity fluff.
In one corner is Sarah Goodwin (Laura Linney), an old-school, tough-as-nails war photographer who hates triviality and who makes Christiane Armapour look like Kathy Lee Gifford. “The camera's there to record life,” Sarah insists, even as she recovers from wounds sustained from a roadside bomb that blew up in her face, “not change it.”
Even in her own apartment, Sarah must suffer the compromised. Her own reporter-boyfriend, James (the earnest Brian D'Arcy James), is a bit too insecure, a bit too interested in marriage and freelance employment to fully live up to the couple's preferred moniker as the Sid and Nancy of journalism. And Sarah's once-loyal, now-pragmatic editor Richard (the uncharacteristically cuddly Eric Bogosian) has stepped back from defending the Lord's work by impregnating a much younger woman (the typecast Alicia Silverstone), whom he likes mostly because of the uncomplicated happiness she brings.
Sarah, by contrast, prefers to record pain. Perhaps she likes it too much. That issue is also in play.
Daniel Sullivan's Manhattan Theatre Club production has the benefit of a blistering performance from the incomparable Linney, who ensures that her potentially shrill character comes with a rich emotional vulnerability to match the force of her personality. At one moment, when Linney's wounded photog falls down on her own floor, it is all you can do to stop yourself ascending to the stage to help. And Silverstone, a better actress than many realize, adds an arresting blend of quirkiness and quiet force to the role of an event planner, a job at which most serious journos look down their increasingly impecunious noses.
Margulies' intermittently poignant play captures many of the frustrations of trying to do the right thing while staying alive in this crisis-strewn media moment. But the arguments sometimes intrude on human believability in this four-character debate.
Lines like “war is just like my parents' home all over again” feel forced. And a subplot involving a past affair Sarah had with one of her in-country fixers feels somehow at odds with all else that we know.
Characters keep going to the bathroom, or out for ice cream, mostly to allow the play to mix up the points of view. More troublingly, the piece relies on idealistic characters who lack the sense of irony their real-world referents invariably exhibit, and who seem overly clueless about the changes in the media marketplace, and thus too-suddenly furious at the compromises they are being asked to make.
These compromises have been around for a while now. A woman as smart as Linney's Sarah would have turned pragmatist, and kept on doing her work.
“Time Stands Still” plays at the Friedman Theatre, 261 W. 47th St., New York; call 212-239-6200.
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