Donald Margulies’s 1996 literary two-hander, Collected Stories, treads cozy if familiar territory for the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright: wry, self-conscious intellectuals from opposite ends of the beleaguered New York cultural elite debate the differences between ethics and morals in crafting fiction. Tired of commuting to her university office, celebrated author Ruth (Jacqueline Grandt) hosts one-on-one tutoring sessions with a promising if unpolished fiction writing graduate student, Lisa (Jillian Warden), in her brownstone walkup. After Lisa finagles her way into an assistant gig for Ruth, professional, professorial, and personal boundaries blur in the mentor/protégé relationship, and the dynamic stretches further as Lisa finds early career success.
Collected Stories
Through 6/5: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Mon 5/16, 7:30 PM (understudy performance); Redtwist Theatre, 1044 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-728-7529, redtwisttheatre.org, $35-$40 ($30-$35 students/seniors).
If that sounds like a slow burn, it’s because it is. At one point, Lisa has a crisis over whether or not it’s too indulgent to be photographed for a magazine profile celebrating her first published nonfiction collection; in another, the pair engage in an extended The View-style parley about the Woody Allen scandal by way of the mid-90s. Both the substance of the debates and Margulies’s loquacious, tangential style feel a bit frozen in time and, compared to where conversations in the arts have moved today, low stakes. That is, until the last half hour of the (two-hour) show, when Margulies’s story and director Ted Hoerl’s Redtwist Theatre traverse staging finally kick up the pace and heat from a conversation piece to a vital work of theater. In these final scenes, Grandt and Warden showcase real nuance and fire as they seek absolution—in vain—from one another. It’s a pity though that, unlike in a story anthology, viewers can’t quite just flip to the good stuff in the back.
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