Ben
Brantley

July 15, 2015

Please, oh please, say that this isn’t goodbye. Jan Maxwell, who recently told Playbill that she was retiring from the stage, is providing audiences with a heartbreaking display of what they’ll be missing when she’s gone. I’d almost call her work in Howard Barker’s “Scenes From an Execution,” which opened on Wednesday night at Atlantic Stage 2 in a first-rate Potomac Theater Project production, the performance of her career. I say “almost” because Ms. Maxwell, a five-time Tony nominee, tends to inspire breathless and definitive pronouncements in whatever her latest role happens to be. That’s been true whether she was portraying a cartoon villainess in an overblown Broadway children’s frolic (“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”), a jaded New York hostess in a Stephen Sondheim musical (“Follies”) or a highly histrionic actress in a classic satire of life in the theater (“The Royal Family”). If “Scenes From an Execution” is really Ms. Maxwell’s valedictory performance (and might we be allowed a hopeful skepticism?), then she’s going out in a blaze of fireworks. And perhaps it’s appropriate that it should be in the part of a raging, uncompromising artist, as seductive as she is abrasive, whom the world does its best to wear down into banality.