Word: furth
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Twigs is the modest title of a modest play that is modestly amusing. Playwright George Furth, who wrote Company's fine book, is skit-and short-story-minded-not the stuff from which sturdy drama is made. He outlines his Twigs' characters like figures in a child's coloring book, and he proceeds to crayon them onstage without depth...
Perhaps it's only a sign of encroaching age, but it's tone of voice I find myself forced to respect and, I'm afraid, even admire. It's an attitude that's also common to Furth's collaboration with Stephen Sondheim in Company and Sondheim's collaboration with James Goldman in Follies as well as in certain passages of Neil Simon's latest work. (Without being lit crit about it all. I even find something in these plays, call it perhaps an aura of faded expectation, that reminds me of the heroes and heroincs one finds in the novels...
There is a wealth of low-key truths lurking in Furth's play--for here, unlike in a Simon comedy, you don't see the gags being cranked out and tossed at you; the revelations instead seem to slip out as if by mistake--which Sada Thompson manages beautifully. Her characterizations are triumphs of inflection. You never for a minute doubt that her women are all relatives under the skin, yet there is never any danger of the four characters melting into one. All the men involved--particularly Oakland, Bain and Haines--approach their roles with a similar respect...
Michael Bennet--who's here making the leap from choreographer to director--has had the courage to let Furth's text speak for itself. In one or two cases, he shows he has the ability deftly to pull off an elaborate visual joke, but mostly he simply allows his actors to sit and talk, a jarringly natural kind of talk that can be rivetting in its lack of pretense. Furth does manage to slip in one or two aphorisms, but generally he wisely settles for just those chuckles of recognition this cast is skilled at eliciting...
...guess then I've backed myself into a rave. A curious position, indeed, since Furth's object is so designedly a minor one. Twigs should prosper from its two weeks here in Boston--for, at present, it's not without moments that are almost too transparently simple as well as two scenes (I and III) a trifle underdeveloped. But then Twigs asks so little from life, what it accomplishes it ends up accomplishing in a very big sort...