The Snow Geese
Opening Night: October 24, 2013
Closing: December 15, 2013
Theater: Samuel J. Friedman
With World War I raging abroad, newly widowed Elizabeth Gaesling gathers her family for their annual shooting party to mark the opening of hunting season in rural, upstate New York. But Elizabeth is forced to confront a new reality as her carefree eldest son comes to terms with his impending deployment overseas and her younger son discovers that the father they all revered left them deeply in debt. Together, the family must let go of the life they’ve always known.
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October 24, 2013
Sharr White’s The Snow Geese certainly contains the standard ingredients required for a contemporary Chekhovian drama. There’s the stately old family home that must soon be vacated, an assemblage of characters that could have been plucked from the pages of Uncle Vanya, The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard (including a delusional matriarch, a sensitive doctor, a demonstratively devout woman and a servant who sees the foolishness in them all), a symbolic title referring to nature and a theme stressing necessity to adapt to unavoidable change.
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October 24, 2013
NEW YORK – At a glance, the title of The Snow Geese might seem to evoke either The Wild Duck or The Seagull, but playwright Sharr White’s chosen model is Chekhov all the way. In case the wintry birch trees framing the stage weren’t clear enough, one lonely voice of pragmatism that might have stepped directly out of The Cherry Orchard says with blunt significance early on, “God knows what would happen if we ever stopped talking and actually did something around here.” But homage is a tricky thing, in this case making for a tedious play that’s stubbornly unaffecting, its pathos hollow and manufactured.
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October 24, 2013
It’s become an all-too- familiar scenario on stage and in film: The comfortably affluent housewife, oblivious to the fact that her family’s money has been drained away due to poor oversight and a total lack of restraint, awakens one day to the sobering reality that the party is over and she must make do with less.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 24, 2013
Sharr White writes so knowingly about complicated women that one might be forgiven for assuming, as I once did, that he is a woman playwright.
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October 24, 2013
As a service to readers and copy editors, I feel the need to point out that “The Snow Geese” and “The Snow Goose” are not the same thing. “The Snow Geese” (plural), a new play by Sharr White that opened on Thursday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, is a sentimental tale set during World War I. “The Snow Goose” (singular), a novella from the early 1940s by Paul Gallico, is a sentimental tale set during World War II.
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