Theatre in Review: Talley's Folly (Roundabout Theatre Company/Laura Pels Theatre)

	Caption: Danny Burstein and Sarah Paulson. Photo: Joan Marcus

In a way, Talley's Folly begins with a lie. Danny Burstein, in the role of the Jewish accountant (and would-be suitor) Matt Friedman appears in the setting of the title (a magnificently ruined boathouse designed with a true poet's eye by Jeff Cowie); addressing the audience, he lets us know we're in for an evening of romance. He adds that a full battery of effects has been marshaled to set the scene: "They promise me moonlight by the baleful, all through the shutters. We could do it on a couple of folding chairs, but it isn't bare, it isn't bombed out, it's run-down, and the difference is all the difference. And valentines need frou-frou."

While it's true that Michael Wilson's first-rate production supplies an atmosphere so evocative that you can practically smell the honeysuckles, Talley's Folly earns its considerable emotional impact the old-fashioned way, with two richly conceived characters, crackling dialogue, and powerful insight into the strange complexities of the human heart. After a slightly gimmicky, jokey opening --Matt chats up the audience, then repeats his speech in double-time for any latecomers -- the author, Lanford Wilson, gets right down to the business of making you care very much whether or not two wildly different, yet oddly suited, loners will make a life together. And when Talley's Folly brings tears to your eyes, every one of them is honestly earned.

Talley's Folly is the linchpin in Lanford Wilson's trilogy about the Talley family, wealthy garment manufacturers in Lebanon, Missouri. It is June 1944, two days before D-Day, and Matt has arrived to plead his case to Sally Talley, who at 31 is becoming "a crazy old-maid Emma Goldman" to her parents and siblings. On the face of it, it looks like Matt's visit is doomed. He met Sally a year earlier and they dated for a week; following a disastrous introduction to her family, he was given the gate. Matt is a Jew, which was enough to disqualify him among the Talleys, a clan of wealthy, bigoted WASPs -- but Matt added fuel to the fire by adding "I don't think much of isms," a comment that included capitalism. "That man is more dangerous than Roosevelt," was her father's assessment.

Now Matt, who lives in St. Louis, is back, determined to discover why Sally has ignored his daily letters and refused to take his calls. Sally is apparently furious to see him -- not least because his appearance has riled up the Talleys, one of whom is prowling the property with a shotgun. But she has also put on her nicest dress and, no matter how many times she is prodded, will not say the words that would send him away forever.

Matt describes the action of Talley's Folly as a "waltz," and indeed, even when voices are raised in anger, it consists of a delicate back and forth in which intimacies of a most melancholy nature must first be traded if anything is going to happen between this embattled pair. It's a painful process: Matt recalls an acquaintance who told him "people are eggs. Said we had to be careful not to bang up against each other too hard. Crack our shells, never be any use again ... We had to keep separate, private. He was very protective of his shell. He said nobody ever knows what the other guy is thinking." Before Talley's Folly is over, some very precious eggs will be cracked.

As Matt tries to pry the truth out of Sally, we see that she is also an outcast in her own home. Having failed to marry the scion of the other rich family in town, she has proceeded to embarrass the Talleys by getting booted from teaching Sunday school -- she read Thorstein Veblen to the children -- and now works as a nurse's aide in a VA hospital, tending to desperately wounded soldiers in partial atonement for the killing the Talleys have made supplying uniforms to the US government. But she nurtures a more private sorrow -- it is never mentioned in the Talley house -- that, she fears, has rendered her unmarriageable. Then again, for all of Matt's vigor, he remains oddly evasive about his past, until forced to recall the terrible events that drove his family across Europe just before World War I. Each of them has been badly damaged by their family histories, leaving them alone and seemingly incapable of deep, lasting love. But a merciful universe has brought them together in a moonlit boathouse on a summer night, and if they can be honest with each other, they will learn that the wounds that have left them so scarred have also reshaped them into complementary forms.

Wilson's waltz of longing is accompanied by some of his best dialogue -- sharp, skeptical, funny, taut, and heartbreaking when required. You'll find no wartime bravado here: "Once again, we are told the country has been saved by war," Matt says with no little bitterness. Sally, talking about how she dreaded the mail each day, knowing it would bring a letter from Matt, says, "I did gain a fondness for the calm respectability of Sunday ... Holidays were a benediction." Fed up with the Talleys, their prejudices and contrariness, Matt snaps, "When they passed out logic everybody in the Ozarks went on a marshmallow roast." Sally admits to reading the works of St. Augustine. "He was a terrible anti-Semite," says Matt. "Worse -- he was a Catholic," replies Sally, a good daughter of the South.

The director, Michael Wilson, found a perfect pair of dance partners in Danny Burstein and Sarah Paulson. Burstein is mercurial -- charming one moment and furious the next -- full of whimsies, and yet relentless in his determination to understand Sally's deep ambivalence. He makes the most of the amusing business of trying on ice skates and attempting to glide his way around the stage, and he has a nice bit of slapstick when, during a small fury, he falls through some rotten flooring. And when, on bended knee, he says with an urgency that won't be denied, "I come down here to tell you I am in love for the only time in my life with a girl who sees the world exactly as I see it," you understand in your gut how thoroughly the happiness of two lives is at stake. Opposite her highly kinetic partner, Paulson provides an object lesson in the value of stillness; she draws you near, listening eagerly for the flash of steel under that honeyed Southern accent, and studying her face for the slightest hint of the turbulent emotions inside.

And yes, of course, as Matt indicates, this is a play where the impact of the design is crucial. Cowie's boathouse, a skeletal structure of torn-up wooden siding framed in an elaborately flowered proscenium, is the perfect setting for clandestine wooing, especially as seen in the moonglow of Rui Rita's lighting. Mark Bennett's sound effects -- crickets, barking dogs, birds -- create the right atmosphere, aided by his original music, heard in the form of a band playing nearby. David C. Woolard has dressed each character with an eye for detail: Matt's boxy brown suit is just what he would wear, and there's something terribly poignant in the sight of Sally sitting, ladylike, in her neat yellow dress.

People tend to remember Talley's Folly as a lovely romance, but, as Wilson's canny production proves, it is much more than that. The Talley plays are about a family's legacy of dissent across the middle decades of the 20th century, as American society is shaped and reshaped by wars. Matt has roamed the world while Sally has remained in Lebanon, but both are refugees; in each other, they finally find a home.--David Barbour