Review: Laura Linney Triumphs in 'My Name Is Lucy Barton'

In My Name Is Lucy Barton, a solo show on Broadway based on Elizabeth Strout's 2016 novel, a Midwestern transplant to New York remembers nine crucial weeks of her life spent in a Manhattan hospital room. 

Her husband is too busy to visit or to bring the kids to visit, but she wakes one day to find her estranged mother sitting by her bedside. Their relationship doesn't really get any better, but her mother stays there, day after day, stalwart.

Laura Linney plays Lucy with a luminous forthrightness, which is the actor's superpower. She excels in conveying the complexities of being an ordinary person trying to figure life out. You can see her every thought skitter across her face.

But one of the great joys of this show is that Lucy is telling us over 90 minutes the story of something that happened to her long ago; which means that Linney is playing both Lucy AND Lucy's mother. Both women are so different (Lucy's mother is emptily garrulous while Lucy is thoughtfully plainspoken) and yet she inhabits both so fully that at times the drama feels like a two-hander. 

Through their "conversations," we learn a lot about Lucy's impoverished childhood in Illinois, her abusive father, her cold marriage. The little details she drops add up to a riveting, heartbreaking work.

"My Name Is Lucy Barton" is about what we owe to those we love — and about how families shape us in ways good and bad. But it's also about how Lucy breaks away from her family and eventually, finds her own voice.

My Name Is Lucy Barton, adapted by Rona Munro from the novel by Elizabeth Strout, directed by Richard Eyre at the Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.