The Real Thing report

Today I saw Tom Stoppard's "The Right Thing", this year's Tony's for best revival of a play, and for its leading couple. Jennifer Ehle is pure energy on the stage, even from the far mezzanine I could feel her character's intense love, and intense contradiction. Tom Stoppard is such a good writer that he wastes the beginning of the play with traditional but great jokes and lines. But it is in the intensity of the dilemma of Max, by the extraordinarily versatile Stephen Dillane, that Stoppard's talent and ideas are revealed. What you do when your love has a lover, but still loves you? How love can support sharing the loved body, even when knowing that is not sharing the love? Whoever hasn't lived through this, in reality or wish, have not lived life, and the play plunge us in the convulsive waters of love, and jealousy, and its harder brother, betrayal. The great survivor is my love for theater, fueled by all this great acting and writing

Claudio Pinhanez writes about his summer in NY.