Duet for Two Hearts

A little over an hour into the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s big-hearted production of Lanford Wilson’s Talley’s Folly, Jonathan West stands center stage, looming over the audience under the tattered gazebo of the Talley family boathouse. “People in Europe are very wasteful of people,” he muses, remembering a horrific event of his past. The entire play has lead to that moment, and West brings it home with a wizened detachment that masks a pain that has nearly paralyzed him all his life. But more than that, he embodies a particular clash of American cultures at mid-20th century. A European Jew looking back (and presciently forward) at horrors visited on his people, framed by America’s sunny infatuation with tradition—faux Victorian brick-a-brack, frayed and crumbling as history marches forward.
Wilson’s play is decidedly a personal story, but also one that resonates with the echoes of global events. West is Matt Friedman, a Jewish tax lawyer who has come to Lebanon, Missouri, to woo Sally Talley, who has done nothing less than revitalize his faith in the power of love and humanity. She’s not exactly a life force. As wonderfully played by Laura Gray, Sally is bitter, fatalistic and closed off from the world. But Friedman senses in her the possibility of connection, and the play spends its 97 minutes peeling away layers of the characters’ psychic armor until those possibilities are beautifully clear to everyone.

Read the complete review at Culture Club.

Photo: Jonathan West as Matt Friedman and Laura Gray as Sally Talley. Amanda Schlicher Photography