Resolute Laura Linney makes certain ‘Time Stands Still’ on Broadway

Donald Margulies' new drama studies a journalist at a crossroads

BY MICHAEL SOMMERS

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

BROADWAY REVIEW

Looking like a broken doll, Laura Linney hobbles on crutches into the opening scene of "Time Stands Still," one arm in a sling and one side of her drawn face pocked with shrapnel scars.

Starring in David Margulies' pensive new Broadway drama, which bowed on Thursday at the Friedman Theatre, Linney invests her personal luminosity and inner fortitude into Sarah, a veteran photojournalist sidelined at home by a bomb blast suffered while covering Mideast horrors.

Despite her near-death experience, Sarah intends to get back into the action. Longtime boyfriend James (Brian D'Arcy James), a combat journalist recently damaged in a different way, wants to get married and stay close to their Williamsburg loft. He is content now to write about the movies.

Boss and mentor Richard (Eric Bogosian) offers Sarah choice local assignments. Richard even sets her an example by hitching up to perky events-planner Mandy (Alicia Silverstone) and having a child.

Loved ones pressing her to stay out of danger, Sarah reluctantly tries to redirect her life. But as months pass by, it becomes apparent that Sarah is an adrenalin junkie hungering for war zones. "I live off the suffering of strangers," she despairs. "I built a career on the sorrows of people I don't know and will never see again."

How the playwright resolves the conflict between Sarah and the people around her (as well as within herself) seems fairly obvious, but "Time Stands Still" remains a worthy though bleak character study. The author of the Pulitzer-winning "Dinner With Friends" and other fine plays like "Brooklyn Boy" and "Sight Unseen," Margulies writes with his usual craft and thoughtfulness.

The lived-in looks of John Lee Beatty's set and the understated naturalness of director Daniel Sullivan's Manhattan Theatre Club staging help to dispel the potential sudsy quality of the story that threatens to bubble forth in Sarah's troubled relationship with her boyfriend.

James and Bogosian provide solid support as the key men in Sarah's life while Silverstone brightens her portrait of a trophy bride with a youthful sense of can-do assurance.

At heart a mournful individual, Sarah might be a total downer were it not for the tensile steeliness of purpose that Linney builds into her character. Setting her jaw and lowering her vocal pitch, Linney effectively makes Sarah a woman on a mission to expose the wounds of the world no matter what the personal price.

"Time Stands Still" continues through March 21 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 W. 47th St., New York. Call (212) 239-6200 or visit www.manhattantheatreclub.com.