"LUNAR ECLIPSE:" A Rarified Moment

This year’s showy Tony nominees included actors who juggle multiple roles in a play; every role in a play; ensemble roles in very large ensemble plays; and bilingual roles in a bilingual play. By contrast, Reed Birney and Lisa Emery spend virtually the entire length of Donald Margolies’ new play, Lunar Eclipse, sitting quietly side-by-side in lawn chairs giving the performances of their careers. They rarely raise their voices; until the play’s end, they barely move from one spot. The power of their body language, together and apart; the sound of their voices, in spoken and unspoken conversation, express a lifetime of emotions. At curtain, a good portion of the audience was in tears.

At curtain rise, Reed Birney’s character, “George,” is himself in tears, heaving with sobs, in fact. It is the only emotionally noisy demonstration of vulnerability that George will display over the entire evening. Lisa Emery’s character, “Em” — George’s wife of many years — conversely seems to radiate vulnerability and emotion. It is there in her responses to her husband — to his, at times, sharpness; at other times, to his sadness. Without rising from her chair, Em seems to be continually scampering to catch George before he falls.

In Lunar Eclipse, Donald Margolies — a longtime playwright of distinction, a Pulitzer Prize-winner for Dinner with Friends in 1999 — has constructed a play about maturity, full of space for his actors to sound the depths of emotions largely left unspoken. These actors match their playwright in accomplishment — Reed Birney has won a Tony Award, an Off Broadway Obie, and is virtually the embodiment of the consummate New York stage actor; Lisa Emery mirrors him in this (including her own Obie) and, in a lovely symmetry, was in the original cast of Mr. Margolies’ Dinner with Friends. Both of them have lived long lives in the theater.

Produced by 2ndStage, at The Pershing Square Signature Center, Lunar Eclipse is set in a field on a farm in Western Kentucky, but it really could be anywhere that a long-married couple might sit and talk — an apartment terrace, a backyard, a car. Yes, the details of hunting dogs and farming specify Western Kentucky, but anyone who has ever tried to tell, or not tell, a longtime partner that they are resented and loved, in different ways at different times, will find the landscape of Lunar Eclipse vividly recognizable.

The play is structured around the nocturnal stages of a lunar eclipse that crosses the night sky until dawn arrives in this Kentucky field. It’s a nicely poetic organizing principle, the one flare in a night of muted introspection. Lunar Eclipse is a play about disappointment, disconnection and, ultimately, dementia, but none of those words are ever uttered. To comprehend how this is possible, you really must go and sit down with George and Em yourselves. Hurry, before it’s too late.