Time Stands Still is not a play that will wrap everything up for us in a tidy package, that will tell us what we need to know and feel about putting your life and values in danger to do journalism in a war zone. Rather, this comedy-drama requires that we do the work ourselves, guided by what the characters do and say: Sarah and John, together for eight years as foreign correspondents, and their friends Richard and Mandy, a May-December pairing that ultimately bears fruit and happiness. And they do not always express themselves consistently: photographer Sarah (the deeply resourceful Holly Twyford) especially, who shields herself from atrocity with her camera lens and a workmanlike defense that taking pictures is “doing my job,” and yet is shaken by a bleeding woman in a market, victim of a bombing, who smears blood on Sarah’s lens, crying “no pictures!”
It will come as no surprise that Sarah begins and ends her journey on the reporter’s side of the mental barrier that divides her from the civilian, despite her life-threatening injuries from a roadside bomb attack. What’s perhaps more interesting is the move to the nurturing center taken by her partner James (the funny, solid, loving Studio newcomer Greg McFadden), even if it does entail a retreat to pseudo-scholarly writing about pop culture and celebrity interviews for Vanity Fair. And let us not overlook Mandy (played by Laura C. Harris with serious depth), who begins the play as the earnest, pretty young thing girlfriend, a figure of ridicule by Sarah and James (Sarah’s look to Richard when Mandy feels it necessary to define “pro bono” is genius) and becomes a grounded, articulate voice for getting on with the task of living here and now.
John McDermott’s lovely live-in New York apartment set on the Metheny’s thrust stage at times presented a blocking challenge; a character would come to the extreme lip of the stage for a monologue with no reason to be there except to talk to us. And I had the feeling that occasionally light spill into the audience was a source of actor distraction.
The piece is one of Donald Margulies most accomplished, unified works, an equal to his Dinner with Friends (albeit with fewer working kitchens required).
- Time Stands Still, by Donald Margulies, directed by Susan Fenichell, The Studio Theatre Metheny Theatre, Washington