Parlour Song

Description
The symbolism is not especially subtle in Jez Butterworth’s bittersweet marital drama, set amid the monotony of a stretch of identical English row houses. (There is perhaps too much talk of sleepwalking and dreaming, and of loss and fear of loss.) But in Neil Pepe’s excellent production for Atlantic Theater Company, the three-person cast shines through the midlife-crisis murk. Chris Bauer and the well-cast Jonathan “Beef” Cake adeptly convey the nervous balance of male friendship, and Emily Mortimer is magnetic as Bauer’s wife: a quietly desperate housewife teetering at the apex of a romantic triangle, with downward slopes at both sides.—AF