Review: `More Stories by Tobias Wolff’
Anthony Nemirovsky is the son and Jeri Lynn Cohen is his mother in the Tobias Wolff short story “Firelight,” one of three stories in Word for Word’s More Stories by Tobias Wolff at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre. Photos by Clayton Lord
Word for Word remains hungry like the Wolff
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The particular alchemy of Word for Word and author Tobias Wolff is undeniable. Six years ago the venerable theater company, which adapts short works of fiction without changing a word of the original text, produced three Wolff short stories, and the result was a theatrical and literary explosion.
Something about Wolff’s deep humanity and understated flair seemed to expand and blossom under the stage lights and in the capable hands of the Word for Word team.
Wolff, happily, is back on stage with Word for Word in the appropriately named More Stories by Tobias Wolff, a trio of tales from the author’s latest short story collection, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories ($26.95, Knopf).
Joel Mullennix directs the stories, and a five-person cast brings them to delectable life on the stage of the Magic Theatre.
Each of the stories is so different, and yet there are threads that run through them – something wistful in the narrative – that helps the evening feel of a piece and underscores the tender, complex authenticity of Wolff’s writing.
“Sanity” opens the evening with two superb performances. Michelle Pava Mills as April, a high school girl worried about her father’s latest stint in a mental hospital and the effect it will have on her second stepmother’s willingness to remain in the family. And Stephanie Hunt is Claire, the cool, collected stepmother whose roiling inner life (not to mention her past) can barely be sensed outside her cool, gray suit and wide-brimmed black hat.
The two women, after visiting the mental hospital, have a long walk back to catch the bus (people in Wolff stories are more likely to take busses than drive cars), and during that walk, Wolff plunges deep into the essence of marriage, of age contrasting youth, of need rebuffed by being needed.
It’s a fascinating, surprising story with …
To read the complete review, please visit my Examiner.com theater page here.
More Stories by Tobias Wolff continues through Oct. 5 at the Magic Theatre, Building D, Fort Mason Center, Marina Boulevard and Buchanan Street, San Francisco. Tickets are $22-$40. Call 415-441-8822 or visit www.zspace.org.