"a play about sadness and heartbreak...but humor makes it possible..."

July 10, 2003 performance reviewed by Pat Nichols

Landscape of the Body concerns a mother and her son who leave Bangor, ME for Greenwich Village chasing a new life. Based on an real-life incident, it plays out in flashbacks as a dark comedy, a mystery, and a detective story, with family complications, teenage angst, mob involvement, murder, and drugs.

Written by Tony Award-winning John Guare, the play explores the depths of family relationships as they battle the realities of life in a big city and try to hang on.

The stage holds "1977" in large numerals with marquee lights against a set starkly black. As the play opens Betty, (Lili Taylor) sits near the railing of the Nantucket Ferry where she writes on small patches of paper which she stuffs into bottles, then drops overboard. A fellow passenger appears and starts to harass her about a murder.

She tells him her son is dead, his body mutilated.

Her dead sister, Rosalie, (Sherie Rene Scott) appears in a long white gown, accuses Betty of not caring enough for her 16 year old son, Bert. She also claims Betty moved in with her and took over her apartment and her life.

Rosalie talks and sings her way through a perfectly-pitched performance as a soft-porn actress, a drug user with no regrets, who lived life to its fullest even as she learned lessons the hard way.

Betty (Lili Taylor) left Maine in hopes of finding her sister and forging a better family relationship but found herself deeply involved in more than she expected, as she slips into a part of the same life that consumed her sister.

Michael Gaston as Detective Captain Marvin Holahan, bent on proving Betty murdered her own son makes himself as obnoxious and strong minded as possible, ignoring Betty's insistence on her innocence.

Bert the son (Joseph Cross), makes the teenager believable as he, too, gets lost in the realities of a big city, gang life, theft and his complicated relationship with his mother, at times difficult, at other times tender.

Betty's former admirer, Durwood Peach (Jonathan Fried) finds and persuades her with his insistence and low key approach (and money) to go with him back to the family home in the South where being with her means he has attained the unattainable.

Director Michael Greif steers the actors through the many flashbacks seamlessly, each time enlarging on what happened and why, without lessening the impact of the pain so evident in the relationships.

Allen Moyer's sets portray a bleak environment that reflects one where hope nearly dies but remains a shred of what could be.

Michael Friedman, David Cohen, Richard Huntley, and Steve Murray keep the music a perfect accompaniment to the play, an enhancement, not a deterrent, as they play from a high platform overlooking the actors.

Landscape of the Body is a play about sadness and heartbreak, about shattered dreams, about unsavory lives and illicit events but humor makes it possible to soften the awfulness of the truths played out on stage with passion and a real sense of pain.

You will leave feeling you were lucky to have been there.