Hold On to Me Darling
Opening Night: March 14, 2016
Closing: April 3, 2016
Theater: Atlantic Theater
On learning of his mother’s death, world famous country and western star Strings McCrane begins questioning the meaning of his life and what it all adds up to. Determined to abandon his celebrity and his career, he moves back to his hometown in Tennessee. It doesn’t go well.
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March 14, 2016
Strings McCrane, a country music and movie star, talks way too much, and half the time he doesn’t even know what he’s saying. As embodied by an entertainingly irritating Timothy Olyphant in “Hold On to Me Darling,” which opened on Monday night at the Linda Gross Theater of the Atlantic Theater Company, Strings is a walking, whining confirmation of our suspicions that the rich and famous really are different from you and me: They’re a lot more shallow and needy. Still, you’re likely to find yourself hanging on every one of Strings’s self-contradicting, self-dramatizing words. That’s because he is the creation of Kenneth Lonergan, a writer with one of the best ears around for the language of the morally challenged — a term that I would say applies to most of the human race. Like springtime, plays from Mr. Lonergan always feel too long in the coming and usually arrive with an awakening joy. The author of “This Is Our Youth” (which was revived on Broadway in 2014) and the screenplay for “You Can Count on Me” (2000), Mr. Lonergan is notorious for holding on to his scripts, rewriting and inflating and, sometimes, undermining them. (The original date on the script for “Hold On to Me Darling” is Jan. 7, 2005.)
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