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September 12, 2017

If you think you’ve heard it all before, then you need to listen more closely.

Watching Simon Stephens’s “On the Shore of the Wide World,” the stealth heartbreaker that opened on Tuesday night at the Linda Gross Theater, you may at first feel a tug of impatience. Surely you’ve already met every one of the characters here, in domestic dramas, novels, even television series: those discontented husbands and wives, parents and children, all mired in stagnant lives.

You know more or less where they’re headed, too, which would be nowhere. And it’s not as if the dead-end road they travel is paved with sparkling dialogue or fiery confrontation. The three generations of a working-class family portrayed in this British work, which won the 2006 Olivier Award for Best Play, are mostly quiet-spoken and liable to reach for the closest cliché to fill a silence.

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