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Conversations with My Wife

Media Reviews

Purepolitics.com:
Conversations with My Wife at the Marietta Theatre in the Square
10/22/2010
Conversations with My Wife at the Marietta Theatre in the Square
Tuesday, 05 October 2010 08:02

Marietta, Georgia- Part of living is dealing with death. Death is a constant force in our daily lives, fortunately the daily routing with living forces us top focus on today and not fixate on our mortality.

In Conversations with My Wife at the Marietta Theatre in the Square running through October 31 delves into the complexity of losing someone.

Loosely based on the playwright’s true life experience, Conversations with My Wife is about Sam (John Stephens) mourning the loss of his wife Sara (Judy Leavell).

Without missing a beat, the opening shift quickly into the death of his beloved Sara. Sam attempts to clear the clutter of his fog by clearing his lifes work. As a writer, it is a rich trove of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

During this self examination he begins a rediscover of his wife and has an imagined conversation with her. Part nostalgic, part self therapy, Sam realizes that he needs to celebrate her life rather than to mourn her death.

This play is a rich journey that will have you realize that all we need to make our dreams come true is to open our eyes to the world around us.

A touching memorable to a loving woman and celebrating life.

Conversations with My Wife is running through October 31, visit www.theatreinthesquare.com or call the box office (770)422-8369.

Creative Loafing:
T-Square's 'Conversations:' Please shut up, I beg of you
10/04/2010
Personal experience invariably provides writers with grist for their creative mills, so it’s not out of bounds for playwright Leonard Gross to draw heavily from his autobiography for Conversations With My Wife. The script wouldn’t exist without Gross’s devotion to his late wife, but Theatre in the Square’s world premiere production suggests the writer needed a little artistic detachment to make a play worth seeing.

A former editor of Look magazine and the author or co-author of 21 books, Gross creates a theatrical surrogate in septaugenarian widower Sam Green (John Stephens, founder of Theatre Gael). Directed by Heidi Cline McKerley, Conversations With My Wife begins as Sam chats with a photo of his deceased spouse Sara (Judy Leavell) as he attempts to throw out a lifetime of paperwork, including some of his recent, unwanted manuscripts.

The play’s first section focuses on an extended, genuinely affecting account of Sara’s illness, decline and death (exacerbated by medical incompetence on two continents) seven years earlier. Leavell appears in flashbacks to express Sara’s fears of being an invalid and Sam’s anguish when she suffers strokes and struggles valiantly but vainly to recover her speech and mobility.

Sam wrote a book about Sara’s health problems, and in the production’s worst decision, Stephens reads his lines aloud from the unpublished manuscript for what seems like half an hour (but was probably more like 20 minutes). Would it violate the show’s fourth-wall integrity to have Sam begin by reading, but then tell the story to the audience? As it is, the device puts such a barrier between the actor and his spectators, he may as well be calling his lines from the wings.

For the remainder of the 90-minute play, Sara appears to interact directly with Sam as either a ghost or figment of his vivid imagination. It’s a familiar device, particularly reminiscent of Neil Simon’s Jake’s Women, only with one woman. Sara is saddened to see how Sam let himself go, and confronts him with evidence that he’s given up on writing, medical care, even his beloved golf game. (Gasp!)

As Sara attempts to renew Sam’s enthusiasm for life, the play means to celebrate her feisty spirit and his enduring love. In practice, Conversations presents long stretches about the splendor of their marriage — replete with travel, children, literary success and great sex — until it feels like an unintentional, roundabout form of self-aggrandizement. If Sara voiced a less idealized vision of their life together, the play might discover some tension (granted, at risk to the premise of the imaginary Sara). Apparently they were a couple that shared no significant arguments, although they revive tedious disagreements over whether Sara should’ve eaten salt in her diet.

Grief and guilt can be powerful, debilitating emotional states, but they can also resist dramatic interpretation. If Stephens wanted his performance to emphasize Sam’s self-loathing, he succeeds too well. With his crabbed body language (partly due to the role’s back problems), restless pacing and petulant behavior, he’s uncomfortable to watch, like trying to talk to someone who refuses to make eye contact. Wallowing in self-pity, Sam becomes insufferable company who bears no resemblance to the vigorous charmer he used to be. When Sam goes on about how he was a “good” writer, but not a “great” one, it’s like he’s fishing for his wife’s compliments.

Like Sara’s attempt to rescue Sam, Leavell throws the production a lifeline with her tender yet spunky portrayal. She frequently plays cantankerous Southern aunts and grandmas, but she carries the cosmopolitan character with complete grace, even when embodying Sara’s post-stroke paralysis. Unfortunately, the play ends by making the title so explicit and embracing such a hoary cliché that it’s downright embarrassing to watch. It also emphasizes Conversations With My Wife’s therapeutic value for the author, even though Theatre in the Square’s staging suggests the play needs more work before it’s ready for the rest of us.

AJC:
Theater Review: "Conversations with My Wife"
10/04/2010
In Gross’ semi-autobiographical two-character drama, Sam Green is a largely unfulfilled author, still grieving the loss of Sara, his wife of nearly 50 years. At first, we meet her in flashback scenes mostly dealing with the phases of her death. Eventually, though, Sara mysteriously appears to Sam as she was in her prime, offering a voice of reason that helps him work out some inner demons.
Theatre in the Square’s world-premiere production, directed by Heidi Cline McKerley, begins at a lethargic crawl from which it never fully recovers. Part of the problem is the casting of John Stephens as Sam. More widely known as a director and the founder of Theatre Gael, as an actor he isn’t always the warmest or most confident stage presence.
For the first 30 minutes, Sam basically paces around his San Francisco penthouse (elegantly designed by John Thigpen), reading aloud from unpublished manuscripts about his life with Sara. And Stephens delivers it all as a monotonous lecture, in the disaffected way a court reporter might read back testimony during a trial.
Whether because of a flaw in the writing, the directing or the acting, that’s valuable time that could have been spent developing an emotional dimension to the character and a personal connection with the audience. Put down the book and talk to us, not at us. We need to feel Sam’s pain before we can really care if it heals.
As the dearly departed Sara, Judy Leavell (“The Lady with All the Answers”) is very much the life of the show, exuding a lovely naturalism that she doesn’t often get to play. Without a word, the performance speaks volumes whenever Sara longs to gently caress her husband – so close, and yet so far away, in another realm, just beyond actual touch.
Still, Leavell has her mouthful of words, too. Gross’ dialogue isn’t much better than his monologue. What starts by sounding like a lecture soon becomes an obviously orchestrated debate. He’s clinging to the past; she urges him to move forward. She thinks he needs to get over it; he’s afraid of getting used to it. He says “ghost”; she says “a consequence of your exceedingly fertile imagination.”
Whether Sam provided Sara with a “comfortable” life or an “adventurous” one depends on which of them is talking. But whatever cathartic adventure the play posed for Gross, this Square production fails to truly move or involve the rest of us – if not making us comfortable, exactly, then at least lulling us into a state of disinterest.

Arts Critic ATL:
Review: Giving up on life after death in the one-act “Conversations with My Wife” at Theatre in the Square
10/04/2010
As a love letter to the playwright’s late spouse, Leonard Gross’ “Conversations with My Wife” is a thoughtful success. As theater, it’s a tedious disappointment in its world premiere at Marietta’s Theatre in the Square.
The proof is practically written right into the title, which alludes to a night in a San Francisco condo in which modestly successful writer Sam Green wrestles with the ghost of his late wife, Sara, in full view. For one act and 90 minutes, we get Sam (awkwardly delivered by Theatre Gael artistic director John Stephens) working through the grief over the death of his wife (an engaging Judy Leavell) over about 14,000 words of dialogue. Gross points this out in the program, at his own peril.
At 73, Sam’s a mess. Seven years after his wife’s passing, all of his writing projects and hobbies have stalled, including his beloved golf, which he’d hoped to parlay into a book called “Shooting Your Age.” He can’t move on, and so Sara appears, however conjured, to help him figure out how, if at all, he can move forward — because all indications point to him giving up on life.
It takes the first 20 minutes of “Conversations” to get to the conversations, because Sam spends the time reading from a kind of diary that recounts Sara’s descent after two horrific strokes. During this phase, Sara appears only in illustrative form, a flashback, at first vibrant and graceful but ultimately a shell. It’s an excruciating dramatic device, and Stephens doesn’t help matters as he limps around the stage, failing to bring his character past a one-dimensional mourner.
A more animated Sara returns for the conversation that might help Sam work through his pain — and only then does “Conversations with My Wife” has any hope of life. That hope lies mostly with Leavell, who on opening night has grasped the nuance of her character and all but leaves her partner behind. As talky as the play is, Leavell tries to find the truth in every line. Never has a dead person been so needed to liven up the proceedings.
One can’t fault Gross’ intentions, which he clearly states are an homage to his late wife. If the script is accurate, Jacqueline Wagoner Gross was a hell of a woman. The character Sara was alternately a loving wife and mother, became a Ph.D. and author in midlife, all while constantly prodding Sam to overcome his self-doubt to up his literary game. Even now she’s Sam’s editor, correcting his mistaken guilt over her suffering and death.
Early on, Sam quotes George Eliot in his hope that “it’s never too late to be what you might have been,” and in his mind only Sara can help him.
Which is all very well and good, but where’s the tension? Sam and Sara are sympathetic enough as everyday people, but hardly intriguing. Here’s a couple that lived the American Dream, traveled around the world together, and settled into the comfort of a San Francisco condo blessed with watercolor paintings and a beloved subscription to The New Yorker. (This is one of a few liberal devices Gross gives his characters, along with references to PBS and a disdain for George W. Bush. The only thing missing was a Volvo onstage.)
As Sara points out to Sam, Death happens. So beyond mourning and some rather tepid guilt over how Sara died, what’s really to fret over in this drama? Some of the problems with “Conversations” go with the staging, and you have to wonder what director Heidi Cline McKerley could have done to enliven the proceedings a little. Instead of enriching the script, McKerley seems burdened by it, and can’t get her leads to a more dynamic level.
Watching the drama, I was reminded of McKerley’s work on the hilarious staging of Charles Ludlam’s “The Mystery of Irma Vep,” another two-actor play but otherwise entirely different. There, McKerley could be faulted for not being able to tame her wildly hilarious if overly effusive leads. Now, she seems more overwhelmed by the script.
Theatre in the Square has rightly earned its reputation as one of metro Atlanta’s worthy playhouses, mixing in newer and challenging works with more familiar fare. Unless McKerley can find a way for her characters to move beyond the discreet charm of their bourgeoisie, “Conversations with My Wife” will remain at best a nice remembrance of a loved one — but at worst, all talked out.

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