An American Daughter

An American Daughter

Reviewed by Ben Brantley

· Witty words will doubtless spoken here.

· Romantic, familiar and even political conflicts will surely occur within a structure as attractively upholstered and sturdily made as the furniture onstage.

· Themes, relationships, plot complications are piled to the toppling point, most of them never satisfactorily defined.

· Lyssa Dent Hughes (Kate Nelligan), the title character of ‘An American Daughter’, is a brilliant doctor, loving wife and mother and scintillating Georgetown hostess who, at the play’s beginning, seems poised to take on the additional, immense duties of the surgeon general.

· Many of the work’s characters bring enough topical and emotional weight to be given plays all their own. Judith B. Kaufman (Lynne Thigpen), Lyssa’s best friend, is a woman’s oncologist who is black and Jewisg and, in her 40’s, struggling desperately to conceive a child.

· Walter Abrahmson (Piter Riegert), Lyssa’s husband, is an academic and author of an influential study of liberalism and deep in a midlife identity crisis.

· Morrow McCarthy (Bruce Norris), a close friend of Lyssa and Alan, a pundit who is young, conservative and gay.

· All these characters can be very funny in describing just who they are and what, in social terms, they represent.

· But their relationships with one another are never credible, again in part because Mrs. Wasserstein is trying for too much.

· Serious acts of betrayal occur in this play but they have no dramatic clout.

· Ms. Wasserstein may be saying something about a world that reduces people to sound bites and social abstractions.

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Academic year 2008/2009