Kelly’s att’y wants ID’s of accusers
AEvery big city has refugees from Big Sky Country. I don’t mean Montana, necessarily, but places with cornfields and soy beans, sunsets and hardbitten neighbors who stare at you across the wideopen space. And parents who mess you up good. Real good.
The takeaway from Broadway’s “My Name is Lucy Barton,” the rich and complex new solo play at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, based on the 2016 novel by Elizabeth Strout and luminously performed by Laura Linney, is that you can move to a world of canyons and Starbucks, progressive politics and veganfriendly journalism — cities where you can’t even glimpse the sky from your bedroom window — and yet, eventually, it is as if you never moved at all. Such is the magnetic, lifelong hold exerted by the circumstances of our youth.
For 90 minutes, we watch a woman, later in her middle age, talk about her grindingly impoverished childhood in fictional Amgash, Ill., somewhere in the Sauk Valley, far west of Chicago. She is the child of an abusive father, suffering from what we now would call PTSD, and a caustic mother who failed to offer enough protection.
Unlike most of her friends, the titular heroine gets out of Dodge. She moves to New York. She develops the “ruthlessness” necessary to become a writer. She marries and has children. And then one day, she gets sick and finds her long-estranged mother, a woman she has not seen for years, at the foot of her hospital bed. The bulk of “Lucy Barton,” which was loyally adapted for the stage by Rona Munro and gently directed by Richard Eyre, is dedicated to the question of what Lucy Barton should do now.
Munro made the decision that we don’t see that mother, a choice that I questioned at times, given the theatrical possibilities that would have opened up. But the decision to make this show a monologue affords a rhetorical tour-deforce for Linney, who utterly commands the stage not in any crude or conventionally amplified sense of that cliche, but in her ability as an actress to universalize — to make it seem like a specific character with an esoteric set of problems and circumstances is speaking for all of us.
This talent of Linney’s, of course, is most uncommon, and it is central to the success of this show imported from London’s Bridge Theatre, along with its set, a hypnotic little design from Bob Crowley and the videographer Luke Hall that constantly contrasts early rural memory with current urban reality, shifting shapes as Lucy tries to find her center. Which probably does not exist.
Is “Lucy Barton” saying that escape from childhood dysfunction is futile? Possibly, although the piece leaves open the possibility that Lucy is a less-than-reliable narrator, which is one of this show’s most interesting qualities.
At the end of the play, Lucy asserts that she has just told us “her” story, a term very much in vogue these days, when we’re all busy proudly self-actualizing. Linney smiles — partly signaling that her character has figured stuff out, partly letting us know that she knows that Lucy knows that no one’s story is really their own.
We all just like to pretend.
R. Kelly’s lawyers requested the names of two “Jane Doe” accusers who are part of the musician’s Brooklyn federal case, writing in a motion that without the names of the alleged victims, they cannot prepare a defense.
The two unnamed victims are key to the prosecution’s case.
One of them, Jane Doe 2, was an underage girl in 1999 who Kelly allegedly coerced into having sex with the intention of creating “visual depictions of such conduct.” And Kelly is accused of kidnapping the second victim, Jane Doe 3, between 2003 and 2004 in Illinois.
In both cases, Kelly’s defense claims to not know the identities of the victims.
“The defense cannot conduct any investigation or adequately prepare for trial without knowing who each of the supposed ‘victims’ are,” wrote Kelly’s attorney Steven Greenberg in the Jan. 9 motion. “It is impossible to interview witnesses, to search for records, or to do anything without this information.”
The feds disagreed, arguing that Kelly’s obstruction in other cases means he should not have access to these victims before the trial.
“The defendant, together with others on his behalf, has a history of obstructive conduct,” federal prosecutors wrote in their own motion to keep the two victims’ names private.
The disgraced R&B singer, who is 52, is accused in a racketeering scheme of heading an enterprise that trafficked women and underage girls who would come to his shows. Kelly allegedly forced the girls to call him “daddy” and did not let them leave their rooms or eat without his permission.
Kelly’s Brooklyn trial is set to begin May 18.