The Busy World Is Hushed
Playwrights Horizons. By Keith Bunin. Dir. Mark Brokaw. With Jill Clayburgh, Hamish Linklater, Luke Macfarlane.
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HOT UNDER THE COLLAR Clayburgh trades ideas with Linklater. Photograph: Joan Marcus |
Keith Bunin’s searching, perceptive and absorbing new play, The Busy World Is Hushed, borrows its title from an Episcopal benediction that views death as “peace at the last.” But the comfort afforded by such a prayer may be predicated on a certain fear of life. In Bunin’s tightly written interrogation of pain and belief, the role of God’s advocate is played by Hannah (Clayburgh), a sharp-minded minister who is constantly working to shore up her relationship with Jesus. “I’m often inclined to hire agnostics as my assistants,” she tells Brandt (Linklater) when he applies to ghostwrite her latest book. “It forces me to be more rigorous.” In the long aftermath of her husband’s suicide, Hannah’s religious determination functions as a balm and a shelter from the violence of the world.
The homecoming of Hannah’s wayward son, the dubious Thomas (Macfarlane)—whose fleeting obsessiveness is worryingly like his father’s—provides the catalyst for a series of unstable reactions that move the play forward in surprising, thought-provoking ways. One of New York’s essential playwrights, Bunin has written wonderful roles for his actors; as the gay, bookish Brandt, Linklater delivers a performance of tremendous warmth and self-deprecating humor, sending off sparks with the flinty Clayburgh (under Mark Brokaw’s crystalline direction). Rooting through the intricate tangle of motivations that undergird personal faith, Bunin offers an empathetic and fair-minded view of religion: not as some derisory opiate of the people but as morphine for someone in possibly mortal pain. — Adam Feldman
June 29, 2006
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