This Day Forward
Opening Night: November 21, 2016
Closing: December 18, 2016
Theater: Vineyard Theatre
Martin thinks he has just married the girl of his dreams, but when Irene makes a surprising confession in their honeymoon suite, all their well-made plans fall apart. Nearly 50 years later, Irene’s children wrestle with their past and a mother whose secrets are quickly fading along with her memory. The inimitable playwright who gave us THE LYONS, PTERODACTYLS, and THE FOOD CHAIN reunites with Mark Brokaw on an unforgettable play about love and marriage and everything in between.
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November 21, 2016
A Nicky Silver premiere sets up a few reasonable expectations: There will be a horrid, selfish mother; her children will grow into unhappy adults; their dad is dead or dying. Those criteria are dutifully met in the acid-penned playwright’s new black comedy. This Day Forward employs a double period structure (the first act is set in 1958; the second in 2004) to explore Silverian motifs of emotional duplicity, toxic parenting and the notion that pain binds families as much as joy. “Shared misery doesn’t make people partners,” Noah (Michael Crane) tells his agitated sister (Francesca Faridany) regarding their mentally unstable mother. The motto could be engraved above Silver’s elegantly savage oeuvre (which includes The Lyons and Too Much Sun, also at the Vineyard).
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November 21, 2016
Nicky Silver is driving with the brakes on in “This Day Forward,” his bumpy and tentative new comedy, which opened on Monday night at the Vineyard Theater. Usually, for better or worse, this mordant playwright can be relied on to go tearing through the barricades of good taste, good manners and sane plotting into his own ecstatic no man’s land of misery. Yet fans of Mr. Silver’s angry wit and whimsy may feel he is missing in action in this portrait of a misbegotten marriage. True, the show has been staged at the Vineyard, Mr. Silver’s longtime creative incubator. The production has been directed with as much smoothness as the script allows by his frequent and fruitful collaborator, Mark Brokaw. And it features themes — monster mothers, emotionally crippled children, love that dies aborning — that have always been dear to Mr. Silver’s darkly sentimental heart. Nonetheless, if I had started watching this play with no foreknowledge and no program, I’m not sure I would have been able to identify it as his work. Though it has been mounted with elaborate care, with a polished cast and fully detailed sets (Allen Moyer) and costumes (Kaye Voyce), “This Day Forward” feels unfulfilled, like a skeleton in search of animating flesh.
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