Theater critics are raving about Laura Linney’s performance in My Name Is Lucy Barton, the Broadway play based on Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 Booker Prize-longlisted novel, which opened Wednesday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.
At The New York Times, critic Ben Brantley writes that “Lucy may be the most translucent figure now on a New York stage.”
“[A]ren’t we grateful for the alchemical, unquantifiable mix of factors that allows this woman—embodied by this actress, at this moment, in this place—to share with us so raptly what she knows, or even thinks she knows?” Brantley says. “When Lucy says, with a satisfaction that’s bigger than happiness, that ‘all life amazes me,’ we feel exactly what she means.”
Allison Adato of Entertainment Weekly calls Linney’s portrayal of Lucy Barton “enthralling.”
“The play, a 90-minute one-act, is a monster of a monologue: Realistic in reflecting the ways that recollections can be inconsistent and tangential, but all the more difficult to memorize for being so,” Adato writes. “Linney’s delivery is seamless.”
In Newsweek, Joe Westerfield praises Linney’s “bravura performance.”
“For all the success she enjoys in her other work, Linney is a stage animal, and in Lucy Barton she is in her element,” he writes. “And any audience will be lucky to catch her there.”
And at Broadway News, Charles Isherwood says that Linney “embodies” the role of Lucy “to perfection.”
“Although there is nothing florid or flashy about it—its delicacy and containment are the opposite of superficial bravura—hers is nevertheless the finest performance of the Broadway season to date,” Isherwood raves.
Michael Schaub is an Austin, Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
