Theater review
“Apples & Oranges”
Grade: A
7:30 Tuesdays-Thursdays. 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays. 2:30 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays. 7:30 p.m. Sundays. Though Oct. 28. $35-$39. Alliance Theatre, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-733-5000, alliancetheatre.org
Bottom line: Terrific.
Alfred Uhry can write a play.
Perhaps you’ve heard of his “Driving Miss Daisy.” Or “The Last Night of Ballyhoo,” which Atlanta’s most decorated playwright sent out to the world from the Alliance Theatre during the 1996 Olympics.
When Uhry comes home, as he does now with his almost perfect new play, “Apples & Oranges,” it’s like putting out the good silver. Based on journalist Marie Brenner’s memoir of the same name — about her exasperatingly complicated relationship with her preternaturally annoying older brother, Carl — this Alliance world premiere is classic Uhry. Raucous and acerbic, sentimental at the core, ultimately devastating, it is a sibling drama that Uhry seems to know as intimately as if it were writ from his own blood.
Carl (Tony Carlin) and Marie (Patricia Richardson) are from an old family of Texas Jews — siblings with enough wounds and grievances to fill a volume by Freud. Most of their time is spent needling one another. And then one day, Carl, a lawyer turned Washington state apple farmer, comes down with cancer. At this point Marie, an ambitious New York writer with an exciting career and a family, tries hard to connect with this bullying, penny-grubbing, agricultural entrepreneur of a brother who has a different girlfriend every time she sees him.
Whether she makes any progress is up for debate. But bless her heart, she never abandons him.
Between long bewildering spells of silence and unanswered calls, Marie follows Carl to Washington (where he lives in a motel room and quests for the perfect apple) to China (where he goes for experimental treatment) and back to San Antonio (where she rents a house and furnishes it with their mama’s old sofas and rugs). To the end, Carl, who Carlin imbues with a touch of Bill Paxton’s salty masculinity, remains true to himself — a lean, mean, unfathomable, powerfully intelligent chick-magnet who is hypercritical of his sister, yet comic, somehow likable, almost heroic.
Played by Richardson with Anne Meara rasp and Tyne Daly steel, Marie can be, in her way, as off-putting as Carl. Whatever you think of Richardson’s account — I liked her naturalistic attack but was somewhat on the fence as the 75-minute one act moved along — she will break your heart at the end. Carl is Marie’s crucible and, after a very strange fashion, her soul.
It’s refreshing to see that director Lynne Meadow trusts the material enough not to adorn it with design. Michael Yeargan’s set is empty but for two stools and a final poetic revelation. Wade Laboissonniere’s costumes are off-the-rack ordinary. The lighting (by Pete Shinn) and incidental music (by Kendall Simpson) are delicately affecting. Here, text is everything. Uhry’s treatment is clean, crisp and efficiently told. I haven’t read Brenner’s memoir, but after seeing this play, I am hungry for it. For those of us have yearned to understand our brothers and sisters, even for people who don’t have siblings, “Apples & Oranges” will exact emotional bite — sharp, piercing, bittersweet.
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