Tonight Laura Linney’s performance of My Name Is Lucy Barton, the play adaption captivated me and changed my opinion of the novel by Elizabeth Strout. When I first read this novel I felt emotionally distant and that Strout was on the cusp of impacting me. The novel tells the story of a deeply complex and tragic childhood that Lucy Barton faces and the ways her childhood and the relationship with her family create a lot of emotional turmoil for her. The novel failed to get me to feel the full weight of the stories, in my first reading. My opinion in seeing this play adaptation of Strout’s novel completely changed my viewpoint on the novel itself. I now can see the power and emotion in this story. Linney delivered such a powerful, raw, and exhilarating performance tonight. In adapting a novel to a play I feel that two things can occur to an audience who know both mediums of the story; one: the audience can feel the layers of the story and truth of the message unfold into many beautiful layers and radiate in different lights. The second can also occur for the audience: the audience can feel that the play adaptation of a novel can over dramatize the story to a point of losing the message originally intended in a novels pages. I felt that Laura Linney delivered a performance of the first reaction. I felt the pages of Elizabeth Strout’s novel propel me into emotion. Propel me into the truth of the story of Lucy Barton. I felt compelled to correct my original interpretation of the novel. Did I judge the story too harshly because it hit a little close to home? Did I flip the pages cavalierly because I did not have a performer staring me in the face forcing me to come to terms with the story? I think it may be a combination of everything above. I think seeing Laura Linney, this woman of such talent and prestige present a one woman performance; that made me feel and think and wonder where my heart had gone wrong in my first understanding of Strout’s work is everything that Strout could have hoped for in a play adaptation of her work. I think the translation from a novel to a stage is interesting in the direction of the lighting, the set design, and the ways Linney so effortlessly created a world bigger than her alone on the stage. She would act out the mother’s lines in the play and within an instant go back to telling the story of Lucy Barton’s life forcing me to have to remind myself it was solely Linney on stage. I think especially with this novel, several characters could have been cast but to have only one woman be on stage it emphasized the loneliness that saturated Strout’s novel. My biggest take away from tonight is that maybe I read the novel wrong the first time. Maybe I let my imagination yield when I related to some of the stories a little too closely. Maybe, just maybe, I had concluded that Elizabeth Strout had failed to capture me emotionally, when I had failed to let myself fully feel Strout’s stories. I am so glad that I got to experience seeing the talent of Laura Linney and that I let Strout’s story of Lucy Barton affect me tonight. I think our viewpoints change on some stories when we let ourselves become affected. I am thankful for the ways this trip is changing me and making me a more effected and affected human.
Tomorrow I head to Paris for a weekend of more adventures!
Cheers,
Rachel
