End of a bleak and lonely road

NEARLY 15 years ago this dark and disturbing drama by Marsha Norman was staged on Broadway in "real time". There was a clock over the proscenium arch which kept real time throughout the performance, played without an interval, so that when epileptic Jessie told her arthritic mother that she was going to shoot herself by ten o'clock, the audience knew exactly where and when it was, and that there would be no escape from the process, whatever its outcome.

The clock was less evident in Deirdre O'Connell's production last night, and the piece was played with an interval, which broke the thread of inexorable tension in the text.

As the time winds down, the two women explore their empty lives. Mother tries to apportion blame on people - the husband she never loved, herself for neglecting her sick daughter (which she never did) - while Jessie blames no one, not even her husband who left her or her son who is set on a course for imprisonment or worse. Jessie has simply reached the end of a bleak and lonely road along which nothing has ever worked for her and to continue the journey has become pointless.

Elizabeth P. Moynihan plays Jessie with a rare authenticity and conveys every ounce of the chilling certainty of her logic. Margaret Toomey's mother is less certain, both physically and emotionally, but the part is a great deal more difficult and challenging.

Deirdre O'Connell's direction is sometimes clumsy, getting the actors into physically difficult situations which threaten credibility, but it captures most of the bleak emotional content of a fine play which won the Pulitzer Prize and deserved it.