Danny Burstein and Sarah Paulson are superb and heartbreaking in the Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of Lanford Wilson’s Talley’s Folly,staged by Michael Wilson.
Matt Friedman has survived pogroms and anti-Semitic horrors, both in Eastern Europe and in France, before and during the war to end all wars. Now America is in the thick of World War II, but he has not enlisted, which makes Sally Talley wonder about his dedication to his adopted country. But there is a bigger problem in his curious courtship of the reluctant Sally: he is not only older, he’s Jewish!
Sally’s unseen Talley family are Old South — even here in Missouri, on the long-compromised border — with textile factories to protect from rapacious workers, with their unfair demands on capitalist work providers. An illness has prevented Sally from ever bearing children, so she is no longer of any value to her family in joining two fabric fortunes. Reading Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class” even got Sally fired from teaching Sunday School. Matt sees real value in a woman with such a frame of mind: Sally is the one for him!
How Matt finally wins Sally is well worth the seeing and hearing. Danny Burstein is a force of nature as he initially wows the audience and eventually dazzles Sally.
Jeff Cowie has designed a spectacular gazebo/boathouse Folly, which almost upstages the romantic sparring of Matt and Sally.
