Franny's Way

Summer, 1957. The streets of Greenwich Village sizzle with the insistent rhythm of jazz. Accompanied by their grandmother, two teenage sisters from the country visit their married cousin in the city. Soon, the young women have embarked on their own private missions involving love, a forgotten child, and a lost mother. Set against the bustling backdrop of New York at mid-century, FRANNY'S WAY is a sensual, provocative ode to desire, longing, and the bittersweet collision of youth and adulthood. "Boundaries warp and melt in the dense urban heat that pervades FRANNY'S WAY, Richard Nelson's sensitively drawn portrait of love in the age of J D Salinger. The lines between childhood and adulthood blur disorientingly for the three generations of characters gathered in a cramped apartment in Greenwich Village at the height of summer in the 1950s ... Mr Nelson is again exploring a shadowy sexuality with which some theatergoers may not be entirely at ease ... FRANNY'S WAY is a wry, rueful and forgiving look at the ways people turn to one another for solace when they feel they have lost their bearings. Sex, as the interplay among the characters gently and insistently reminds you, may be a primal drive, but it doesn't always follow a straight course. Mr Nelson continues to give compassionate and insightful life to such erotic waywardness." -Ben Brantley, The New York Times ..". one of the deftest achievements of Nelson's taut script is his crafting a dialogue of indirection. Hurts and jealousies roil beneath petty arguments over hogging time in the bathroom. Primal longings for affection well up in comments about the steamy jazz wafting in from a club beneath the window." -Alisa Solomon, Village Voice