Maev Beaty in “My Name is Lucy Barton”, Photo by Dahlia Katz
Spending an hour and forty-five minutes with Maev Beaty is a delight, almost entirely regardless of context, so it’s especially thrilling that My Name is Lucy Barton, directed by Jackie Maxwell for Canadian Stage, offers such beautifully written and elegantly staged one-on-one time with her. Based on Elizabeth Strout’s novel (which I haven’t read, but immediately put on hold at the library!), Rona Munro’s theatrical adaptation has Beaty portray both Lucy and her colourful mother. Having not seen each other in many years, the two women reconnect through stories—of their own lives and an array of intersecting people who, in some distinct way, helped shape them.
Beaty shares the stage with just a hospital bed and an adjacent chair; these two artifacts are tethers in a roiling sea of living memory. Behind her, spanning the whole length of the stage, is a vast screen on which Amelia Scott’s projections provide an eerie echo of the environments Barton conjures through her words. Vague shapes come into focus—florescent light panels, rain drops on a window, a field of corn beneath sky—before blending and blurring into undulating abstractions of colour that are very Edvard Munch. The super shiny stage floor, a deliberate element, extends the effect.
Her story—and the whole fractal symmetry of the stories within it—feels honest and remarkable in its mundane, human details. It begins with the sudden, astonishing presence of her mother in the chair at the foot of her hospital bed. She stays for most of the nine weeks of her daughter’s recuperation from some enigmatic, potentially life-threatening complications from surgery. The two women exist together, hovering precariously between the generation before and the one after. Each woman’s rural American childhood informs their perspective, their individuality thrown into sharp relief amidst ancestors and offspring.
The second world war, the AIDS crisis, 9/11—so many cultural landmarks figure into this story on an intimate, human scale. As Lucy rediscovers her mother, reaches back into history to better understand her present, we glimpse kindness and cruelty and ignorance. So many eerie traumas—poverty, child abuse, homophobia—interrogated without judgement. Though Lucy has a life in New York, she is rooted to the rural mid-west—a romantic eye for hardworking, modest folks while also subverting the homespun mystique.
Beaty inhabits each of these women with a full and compelling authenticity. It isn’t just her attention to voice and posture, there’s such dynamic timing and ambiance, charging the air differently between them. She establishes a palpable connection between these woman and her audience. Even ambiguities are resonant and deeply satisfying. What exactly happened with the snake in a truck? What made her mother feel so unsafe as a girl? We aren’t told, not explicitly, but on some level—we know.
Such a witty, grounded and haunting piece a theatre achieved with a beguiling lightness of touch.
My Name is Lucy Barton
running Oct 18 to November 2, 2024
Bluma Appel Theatre (27 Front St. East)
running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes (no intermission)
Maev Beaty in “My Name is Lucy Barton”, Photo by Dahlia Katz