In Sweet Sue, however, the play might be better if there were only two actors on stage, but it is certainly worse for the use of the split-role mechanism.Īfter Footlight’s great start this season with the popular Accomplice and the naughty Things You Shouldn’t Say Past Midnight, the production of Sweet Sue feels like a letdown. Each of these added to the play and added something to the American stage. In the former, he used correspondence as the delivery medium, and in the latter a “party critic” is the vehicle by which the story is told. Gurney is after all a truly gifted playwright, but he tends to use an artifice in his plays as a gimmick to tell his stories such as in Love Letters or The Cocktail Hour. Sweet Sue has never been popular with critics, but when even the audience is indifferent to the success or failure of the characters’ relationships, there is little left to watch. That the most exciting moment comes when the two men are naked on stage (it’s artistic rather than sexual only their buttocks show) summarizes what’s missing in this show. There is little to fault the actors or their direction in this production, because what the play boils down to is this: Will they or won’t they end up together? As written, though, there is little reason for the audience to care, one way or the other. Is it the author’s attempt to portray his own dual role? From a purely academic standpoint, arguments are made for the relevancy of the play given its nuances and intricacies. When the play opened on Broadway in 1987, the casting of Mary Tyler Moore and Lynn Redgrave in the title roles was its best strength, but time has not made the play more relevant or interesting. The Footlight’s presentation of the material is not the problem rather, it’s the material itself. Unlike other such situations, such as Peter Nichol’s Passions, in which one actor might be the subconscious urging the other to some deed, in this script, they are merely two representations of the same person, without enough difference to make them interesting. A variation on the classic story of a middle-aged woman and a younger man who have a summer romance, it splits each role in two but gains little for the effort. These qualities fail to emerge in Footlight’s production of Sweet Sue. Gurney is one of the best of American playwrights, an acknowledged expert on WASP culture and its romantic conventions.
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