NY Review: 'Open Hearts'

Fleshing out six characters—their histories, relationships, failures, and transformations—is a lofty goal for any storyteller. Television dramas sometimes take years to do it; Miriam Kulick's "Open Hearts" tries it in barely more than an hour. But while the one-woman show valiantly attempts to explore the willful attachments of the human heart, it rarely manages to go more than skin deep.

The matriarch of Kulick's community is Sadie Nussbaum, an Upper East Side bubbe preparing to celebrate her 90th birthday. Through the course of a day, she encounters the diverse cast of characters who inhabit her world, all while thinking of and communicating with those who have passed on to the next one: her husband, her twin sister, and her daughter Sarah, who committed suicide several years earlier.

"Open Hearts" began as a two-person play, and the current production, directed by Gretchen Cryer, still bears traces of those origins. While the current one-woman format thoughtfully reinforces the interconnectedness of Kulick's characters, the result is uneven in its execution. When assuming new characters, Kulick often wanders to the side of the bare-bones set; at other times, she switches personas in the middle of a phone conversation, a startling change that seems to have stemmed from an earlier incarnation and is made awkward by the translation to monologue.

But more problematic in "Open Hearts" than these rapid-fire character transitions is the uniform torrent of verbiage from the individuals themselves. In her postures and movements, Kulick assumes an impressive grab bag of identities; she shuffles across the room as the comically slow Sadie, then leaps and twirls as her granddaughter. But the unvarying pace of her delivery, which persists through every character she becomes, leaves no pauses for emotions to emerge and distinct personalities to coalesce. Without them, the parade of ages, nationalities, genders, and sexualities loses much of its nuance, becoming an assemblage of clichés, sometimes ones with questionable accents.

Sadie is the lynchpin that holds this pack together, albeit a begrudging one. "This matriarchal position is wearing me down," she gripes. Kulick clearly structures her play around this central figure and her incipient transition from dwelling in the past to acknowledging her community of the present. In her program note, Kulick writes, "Once we accept and love ourselves first, then we are ready to open our hearts to those around us."



But for Sadie this acceptance never comes—that is, we never witness its arrival. By presenting many quick sketches of the characters who touch Sadie's life, Kulick doesn't allow us to see her reactions to them. "Open Hearts" is like an hourlong montage: a summary of major events in Sadie's emotional education rather than a journey through them. In the play's final moments, Sadie, newly transformed, has the realization that "the living still need me." But without watching her get there, the audience is left behind, unchanged.

Presented by Miriam Kulick at the Studio Theatre, 410 W. 42nd St. NYC. April 19–28. Remaining performances: Fri., April 20 and 27, 7:30 p.m.; Sat., April 28, 7:30 p.m. (212) 239-6200, (800) 432-7250, or www.telecharge.com.