TALLEY’S FOLLY
The fundamental lie is the script itself, which won playwright Lanford Wilson a Pulitzer in 1980. Basically it’s a cornball love story featuring only two characters, Matt Friedman and Sally Talley. The time is July 4, 1944, and the scene is the boat house on the Talley homestead in Lebanon, Missouri. Although Matt and Sally have only spent a week together–and that week was the summer before–Matt has driven down from Saint Louis to propose. So he gives her the hard sell. She resists; he persists. Eventually they bare their souls in big monologues revealing the traumas that misshaped their lives. Then, having licked one another’s wounds, they decide to elope.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Debbie Simmons attempts a rather preposterous accent herself, which she must have picked up playing Amanda in The Glass Menagerie. Why is it that when midwesterners try to sound midwestern, it comes out as some crude parody of a southern accent? Anyway, Simmons’s accent comes and goes too, but fortunately it goes more often and takes its time coming back. So there are actually moments when you can, sort of, take Sally seriously. Like when Matt makes an analogy about how people are eggs afraid of being broken and Sally hesitates. She’s about to say something–take a risk, open up, whatever–but she doesn’t. You get a glimpse of Sally’s vulnerability, and Simmons pulls this moment off well. But this and a handful of other times when Sally comes into focus must necessarily be measured against an overall soapy, blurry characterization. And so once more the ephemeral truth highlights the incumbent lie.
