New England

Subtitled A Comedy of Trans-Atlantic Manners. An Englishman and his family live far-flung across the vast American continent. Brought together by tragedy, they find comfort in attacking their adopted country, ridiculing its crude ways and lack of standards. Humor and irony as well as the sense of loss and longing permeate this story of exiles unable to address a world that is passing by.

This dark comedy begins, quite literally, with a bang: A man sitting in the book-lined den of his Connecticut farmhouse puts a revolver to his head and, as his girlfriend, Alice, walks into the room, pulls the trigger (done with startlingly bloody effect). Next 85 of the play’s 90 minutes detail a gathering of the clan as the man’s adult children, among others, argue away a tension-packed night on the eve of the memorial service. Hosting this often-nasty get-together of British expatriates is Alice, the suicide’s middle-aged mistress who two years prior had given up a successful publishing career in New York for a country life shared with a man she slowly realizes she never really knew…witty, acerbic banter.

Greg Evans, Variety

NEW ENGLAND, played without intermission, is bold in its form: the climax comes in the first scene. The next seven scenes are an extended coda, not so much to Harry’s life as to the British-American culture gap and to a world made orderly by distinctions of class and education…a work of intelligence and wit.

Vincent Canby, The New York Times