‘My Name is Lucy Barton’: Theater Review

Linney’s emotional transparency is wondrous as she relates the different ways in which mother and daughter reach out to one another for forgiveness without ever saying the words, each of them revealing a difficult admiration for the other that’s almost like love. Equally extraordinary is Linney’s ability to speak with warmth, immediacy and the grounded wisdom of hindsight while simultaneously inhabiting a precarious moment from many years before. Embodying both the reinvented Lucy and the more fragile versions of her childhood and earlier adult years, she fills the stage, making this delicate memory piece resonate with the soaring vitality of a fully lived-in present.