Tuesday, Dec. 08, 2009
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Rebecca Gilman (Boy Gets Girl, Spinning into Butter) has adapted Carson McCullers' novel about a deaf mute who becomes the confidante for an assorted group of lost souls in a Georgia town in 1938 with great intelligence and feeling, in this play first produced in Atlanta in 2005 and just opened off-Broadway. In a collage of short scenes that expertly juggle a half-dozen plot threads and characters (who, in Doug Hughes' lovely production, linger on the stage even when the spotlight leaves them), Gilman creates an eloquent, unsentimental and ineffably sad tapestry of broken Depression-era dreams.