Bottom of the World
Opening Night: September 14, 2010
Closing: October 3, 2010
Theater: Atlantic Stage Two
Heartbroken over the sudden death of her sister, Kate, Abby delves into the world of Kate’s final novel to deal with her grief and somehow move on. As the lines blur between the fictional world and her own reality, Abby attempts to make sense of life and death in this funny and poignant play.
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September 14, 2010
Much care has been taken to provide an appealing frame for Lucy Thurber’s play “Bottom of the World,” which opened on Tuesday night at the Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage 2. Walt Spangler’s elaborate set is dominated by an impressive wooden structure suggesting the expansive reach of an old tree. On the platform provided by one of the sturdier branches, two excellent musicians supply bluegrass music, evocatively used to add emotional coloring to various scenes. Live music is a rare and appealing luxury at a modest Off Broadway production like this.
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September 15, 2010
Nothing is too outré for the theater these days. Wall-to- wall profanity? Strictly for amateurs. Onstage vomiting? So yesterday. Lucy Thurber isn’t afraid to up the ante: In her plays, people are tender with each other. They show vulnerability. They fumble with desire. In an age of escalating shock tactics, this seems downright radical.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 14, 2010
"When Worlds Collide" would have been a better title for Lucy Thurber’s "Bottom of the World," an uneven comedy-drama that only half succeeds. The main character is Abigail, a young lesbian in mourning for her older sister Kate, a novelist who was killed in a fire. As Abigail deals with her grief, her new girlfriend Gina, and the crazed antics of the disintegrating family of her best friend, Susan, she reads her sister’s last work of fiction. Scenes from the two realities alternate as Kate’s ghost watches from atop Walt Spangler’s weird set of bizarrely arranged wooden planks, which resembles a giant game of pick-up-sticks.
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September 15, 2010
It is, perhaps, a cliché to say that death is much harder on the living than it is on the dead. But that doesn’t make Lucy Thurber’s absorbing world premiere drama Bottom of the World, now at Atlantic Stage 2, any less emotionally resonant.
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September 15, 2010
Walt Spangler’s set for Lucy Thurber’s unsatisfying melodrama Bottom of the World makes the dungeonish theater at Atlantic Stage 2 feel somehow cozy. Two-by-fours surge out of the floor, arching over us like a spreading beech tree, fairy lights atwinkle in the rigid “branches.” And at its best, Thurber’s drama matches Spangler’s snug atmosphere. In the play’s story-within-a-story, Thurber dials back her self-conscious speechifying to indulge in cheerful, country-fried vignettes. There’s a hoedown and aw-shucks dialogue about pie, for crissakes, and yet these clichés ring with far more truth than the clanking sentimentality of the framing drama
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