Too Much Sun
Opening Night: May 18, 2014
Closing: June 22, 2014
Theater: Vineyard Theatre
In Too Much Sun Audrey Langham – a celebrated actress – unravels completely while preparing for a new production of Medea. With nowhere else to go, she descends upon her married daughter for a summer by the sea. She is not, however, greeted with confetti and champagne. Her arrival sets off a chain of events alternately hilarious and harrowing. This stirring story of an unforgettable summer reunites playwright Nicky Silver, director Mark Brokaw and Tony Award-winning actress Linda Lavin following their acclaimed collaboration on The Lyons and its subsequent Broadway transfer.
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May 18, 2014
What’s love got to do with it? Audrey Langham, an actress of modest fame and exceptional survival skills, has just set eyes on a man who might do nicely as her sixth husband. Or would it be her seventh? Audrey, played by the remarkable Linda Lavin in Nicky Silver’s Too Much Sun at the Vineyard Theater, is fuzzy on personal math. But on the issue of taking care of Audrey, she is as focused — and as mesmerizing — as a starving cobra sizing up its next meal. To watch Audrey in action is to see Darwinian theory made flesh. And to watch Ms. Lavin doing Audrey in action is to see a veteran actress, whose own interpretive instincts have never been sharper, at the very top of her game. Too Much Sun, which opened on Sunday night in an astutely acted production that features Jennifer Westfeldt (as Audrey’s unfortunate daughter) and sharp direction by Mark Brokaw, is hardly a perfect play. Mr. Silver, author of The Lyons and Raised in Captivity, has always combined show-off juvenile cleverness with a mature philosophical melancholy; his unevenness is as immense as his talents. His latest work shows evidence of both of these aspects.
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May 18, 2014
Stage animals don’t come more magnetic than Linda Lavin. She’s a fierce star with the gift of grab. But her estimable gifts can’t put a shine on Nicky Silver’s murky tragicomic hodgepodge,Too Much Sun. This unfocused glimpse at sick psyches and family dysfunction disappoints, especially given Silver’s very good last work, The Lyons. Lavin left emotional claw marks as a mother from hell in that — and she’s doing more of the same as Audrey Langham, a diva-like actress who ditches a Chicago production of Medea and crashes, uninvited, at the seaside cottage of her kid, Kitty (Jennifer Westfeldt).
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May 18, 2014
Unlike at the movies, sequels are rarely seen at the theater. But Too Much Sun, the latest work by the prolific playwright Nicky Silver, could be viewed as a sequel to his family drama The Lyons. If not technically a sequel, it certainly feels like a repeat of the former experience. The Lyons also started out at Off-Broadway’s Vineyard Theatre (before it transferred to Broadway in 2012) and starred Linda Lavin as a difficult Jewish mother dealing with frustrated grown-up children and showing a nonchalant attitude in the face of crisis. Mark Brokaw once again serves as the director.
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May 18, 2014
In Nicky Silver’s previous play, The Lyons, which originated at the Vineyard under the direction of Mark Brokaw, Linda Lavin played a mother who ruins her children’s lives to gratify her own monstrous ego. In the scribe’s new play, Too Much Sun, which just opened at the Vineyard under the direction of Brokaw, Lavin plays a mother who ruins her daughter’s life to gratify her own monstrous ego. And just for laughs, this modern-day Medea actually gets to play the role of that murderous Greek matriarch in the prologue. The play is one of Silver’s slapdash specials — loosely hinged scenes in which adults behave like bratty children, blaming one another for things they’ve done or failed to do with their lives. But, standing alone in front of a stage curtain, Lavin is priceless in that opening scene. Resplendent in the gaudy red-and-gold robe, golden coronet and tight little golden curls supplied by costumer Michael Krass, she’s completely absorbed in the role of Audrey Langham, a celebrated but notoriously difficult stage star condemned to play Medea in Chicago, a very demanding theater town.
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May 19, 2014
A grand dame of the stage stands front and center in a generically “Eastern” sheer red dress covered in what appears to be the CBS logo. This is Medea, the sorceress from a Greek myth who sacrifices her children in a jealous rage to spite her husband. Well, actually it’s just Linda Lavin playing Audrey Langham playing Medea in a terrible Chicago production of the millennia-old tragedy by Euripides. Before storming out of this disastrous technical rehearsal, she screams at her director, “Who wants to sit through Medea anyway?!” Apparently, a lot of people. Passionate love, with all its ensuing jealousy, rage, and cruelty, still has as much currency in our society as it did in the age of Euripides. Playwright Nicky Silver thinks it’s a dangerous obsession, and he will let you know as much in his hilarious and heartbreaking (but not particularly original) new play, Too Much Sun, now receiving its world premiere at the Vineyard Theatre.
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