OLDEST LIVING CONFEDERATE WIDOW TELLS ALL [ 1/2]
Longacre Theatre, 220 W. 48th St.; (212) 239-6200
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ELLEN Burstyn opened at the Longacre Theatre last night in her one-woman play, “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All.” And all. And then some.
With a rosy smile, an accent redolent of molasses and a sassy mien, Burstyn seemed more like a spry 70-year-old than the 99-year-old Lucy Marsden she was meant to portray.
Martin Tahse’s play, adapted from the best-selling novel by Allan Gurganus, has Lucy toward the end of her life in 1985, telling a charity benefit audience at an Old Person’s Home about her 1899 marriage, at age 15, to a 50-year-old Civil War veteran.
As Lucy points out early on, in what is perhaps the only truly insightful line of the play, “stories only happen to people who can tell them.” It’s wickedly cynical but contains a kernel of truth.
Our Lucy can sure spin a good tale, but unlike that other storyteller Scheherazade, she doesn’t go on for 1,001 Arabian Nights – although it may sometimes feel that way.
Most of the stories didn’t actually happen to Lucy but to her long-dead husband, Capt. Willie Marsden, known as Cap, of the Confederate Army.
And some of the stories doubtless didn’t happen even to the fictional Willie – or were markedly retouched in detail and amplified in fact.
For starters, Willie was never actually a captain in the Army, but a private. It seems he promoted himself by, as it were, incremental anecdote, and eventually it became an accepted fact, with a captain’s grand gray uniform, sash, sword and all.
Lucy’s stories are eccentric and oddly ornery. But they are fascinatingly graphic about Gen. Sherman’s fiery push to Atlanta, and they might illuminate aspects of black/white relationships in the South during the first few decades of the 20th century.
Admittedly, Lucy – at least in the narrative hands of playwright Tahse and novelist Gurganus – is one of those born storytellers.
But I think I would have preferred her to have been born something else, for I count myself a Civil War buff and frankly I didn’t find Lucy, Cap and their stories all that interesting,
The single set by Allen Moyer looked modest to the point of cheap. Moreover, depite the sterling efforts of an elegantly passionate Burstyn and the caring direction of Don Scardino, this strange, spunky old lady never really came to life.
Perhaps one should just read the novel.