What’s Really Fair in Love and War?

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
nytimes.com

Sarah Goodwin, the complicated woman at the heart of “Time Stands Still,” seems to thrive on conflict, at least professionally. A photojournalist who covers wars and global strife, she keeps chaos at arm’s length by trapping it in the camera lens, exerting a fierce control over moments of horror by fixing them in time.

The visitors: Eric Bogosian, as the couple’s old friend, and Alicia Silverstone as his new, much younger girlfriend.

But the flux of Sarah’s own life cannot be manipulated so easily, as she learns with growing sorrow in this thoughtful drama by Donald Margulies that stars Laura Linney and Brian d’Arcy James, giving performances of complementary sensitivity and richness. Conflicting needs cannot be held at a cool distance; the wounds of the past cannot be filed away like old negatives; the change that experience brings is not reversible.

“Time Stands Still,” which opened Thursday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in a flawless Manhattan Theater Club production directed by Daniel Sullivan, is handily Mr. Margulies’s finest play since the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Dinner With Friends.” Like that keenly observed drama about the growing pains of adulthood, the new play explores the relationship between two couples at a crucial juncture in their lives, when the desire to move forward clashes with the instinct to stay comfortably — or even uncomfortably — in place.

As the play opens, the challenges facing Sarah and her partner, James Dodd (Ms. Linney and Mr. d’Arcy James), seem clear enough. James has just brought Sarah home from a hospital in Germany, where she was recuperating from severe injuries suffered while she was covering the war in Iraq. Antsy and unused to the burdens of repose, Sarah rebuffs James’s constant efforts to cushion her from the bumps and bruises of recovery. His anxiety is amplified by a lingering sense of guilt: a reporter himself, he had suffered a breakdown in Iraq and returned to the United States shortly before Sarah’s accident, which has left her with a bum leg and scarred face.

Just how much has changed since Sarah was on assignment is brought home when they receive a visit from their good friend Richard Ehrlich (Eric Bogosian), Sarah’s former flame and mentor from many years before who is the photo editor at a newsmagazine. Richard has a new, much younger girlfriend in tow, Mandy (Alicia Silverstone), whose introduction of a pair of tacky silver balloons into James and Sarah’s funky loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, telegraphs just how markedly her sensibility differs from theirs.

Sarah accepts this absurd gift with devastating cool, as she greets all Mandy’s efforts to ingratiate herself. These include Mandy’s announcement that she has been praying for Sarah’s quick recovery. “It’s weird ’cause it’s not like I believe in God or anything,” Mandy adds, chirping away obliviously.

Ms. Silverstone, whose Broadway debut came in the dreary stage adaptation of “The Graduate,” gets a happy chance at redemption in a tricky role to which she brings warmth, actorly intelligence and delicate humor. She achieves the lovely feat of allowing us to laugh at Mandy’s shallowness even as we are charmed by her good-heartedness.

When Mandy disappears into the bathroom, Sarah and James blandly profess to find her “adorable” and “darling,” in tones that make this anodyne praise sound damning. Richard has been running conversational interference in an attempt to minimize Mandy’s missteps, a process that the terrific Mr. Bogosian illustrates in precise comic detail, as Richard’s romantic ardor wars with intellectual mortification.

Eventually Richard becomes righteous, insisting that the relationship isn’t just a matter of a middle-aged guy chasing younger women. Sarah’s withering reply: “There’s young, and there’s embryonic.”

Mr. Margulies is gifted at creating complex characters through wholly natural interaction, allowing the emotional layers, the long histories, the hidden kernels of conflict to emerge organically. His dialogue throughout “Time Stands Still” crackles with bright wit and intelligence, but it is almost always an expression of the characters’ personalities, not a function of the author’s need to dazzle and entertain. (A few lines feel false or glib, as when Sarah says, “War was my parents’ house all over again, only on a different scale.”)

He also folds into the writing a few trenchant debates about the moral ambiguities of journalists’ role in covering atrocities. In the play’s premiere production, at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles last year, these sometimes felt tacked on, but Mr. Sullivan, who also staged that version, and his largely new cast have mostly smoothed out any lumps in the writing. The heart of “Time Stands Still” resides in the gently evolving relationship between Sarah and James, which develops troubling new ripples in each scene.