SEE OR SKIP: Don’t Wake Me: The Ballad of Nihal Armstrong
In this arts column, rather than provide a lengthy critique, we hit the bullet points and share our thoughts on whether a show is worth seeing or skipping. Of course, your own reasons for picking or ignoring a show might be based on price, time, discounts, availability, subject interest, word of mouth and personal taste. Feel free to add our voice to the chorus.
SHOW: Don’t Wake Me: The Ballad of Nihal Armstrong
VENUE: 59E59 Theater
VENUE TYPE: off-Broadway
SEE because:
This is a powerful, true story about a woman whose son – partially due to hospital negligence – is born with cerebral palsy and a raft of other health issues. The play, written by the mother herself, is wrenchingly heart-felt from first word to last.
The show’s dark subject brings up such relevant (and not-so-easily answered) problems involving mainstreaming and integrating the severely challenged into school and society.
Actress Jaye Griffiths has an exceptionally graceful stage presence and a voice rich with warmth and resonance in its low tones.
The staging, by Guy Slater, is intimate and intense, so bring hankies. Several.
At 70 minutes without intermission, the play lasts just long enough to pack a punch but not so long that the experience is an ordeal (though, of course, the plot recounts an ordeal).
SKIP because:
Author Rahila Gupta’s text can be poetic to a fault. At times we notice the end-rhyme and start waiting for the next one instead of the information conveyed in the verse leading up to it.
Perhaps unavoidably, there’s a repetitive yes/but, back-and-forth nature to the storytelling. Every time something positive happens, it’s short-lived followed by a “but then…” As biography, it’s tragic; as storytelling, it’s predictable.
Actress Griffiths gets SO emotional, there’s something a mite unseemly about her overt displays of grief here. With all due respect, she’s not the real mom, she’s just playing her several times a week on a stage. There’s enough to weep about from the material; the audience doesn’t need her doing the sobbing for us.
FINAL CALL: SEE, because:
This is movie-of-the-week material elevated to a higher level by fine writing, graceful acting and a story that you’d have to be made of granite not to find moving.
