Stephen Adly Guirgis' The Little Flower of East Orange, now at The Public
Theater, has clear overlaps with his earlier, Our Lady of 121st Street. Both are vivid slices of working-class speech and behavior. Here, an old woman, beautifully portrayed by the radiant Ellen Burstyn, prepares to leave Earth. She's wonderful in a complex role as she drifts in and out of consciousness and dreams and memories.
Guirgis captures the poetic rhythms in the colorful speech of her dysfunctional, hysterical son and daughter, the nurses, the doctor and others.