My Name is Lucy Barton is a play based on the acclaimed New York Times best-selling novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout. It’s a powerful one-person show which first premiered at London’s Bridge Theatre in 2018, moving to Broadway in 2020 with Laura Linney in the title role. In Toronto, the talented Canadian actor Maev Beaty steps into the lead.
The book was first published in 2016 and was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. The subsequent stage adaptation was written by acclaimed Scottish playwright and screenwriter Rona Munroe who is known for her collaboration with filmmaker Ken Loach and for penning the internationally acclaimed James Plays cycle.
In this riveting drama, the character wakes after an operation to discover – much to her surprise – her mother at the foot of her bed. They haven’t seen each other in years. During their days-long visit, Lucy contemplates her desperate rural childhood, her adult life in New York, and the state of her relationships as both a daughter and a mother.
My Name is Lucy Barton rings breathlessly true on themes that recur throughout Strout’s bibliography: the difficulties of making sense of the past and finding your place in the world. It also is about the unbearably close and complex relationships between mothers and daughters; how the tragedies of one generation are visited on the next.
Maev Beaty is a critically acclaimed and multi-award-winning stage and screen actor. She may be most recognized for her leading roles at the Stratford Festival including playing Beatrice in the Festival’s 2023 hit production of Much Ado About Nothing. She has originated roles in over 20 Canadian premieres including Hannah Moscovitch’s Bunny and Kate Hennig’s The Last Wife. Beaty is a three-time Dora Award winner and ten-time nominee in both performing and writing. In addition to her stage work, she has appeared in acclaimed independent films including the 2019 TIFF Special Presentation MOUTHPIECE and in Ari Aster’s 2023 film Beau Is Afraid.
We had a chance to chat with Maev about My Name is Lucy Barton…
How did you approach the role of Lucy Barton? What was your process in understanding her complexities?
Maev: There is a wonderful line in the play where Lucy says “I like writers who try to tell you something truthful”. There is a frustrating cliché many actors encounter at some point in their life of “well you’re an actor, how do I know when you’re lying?”. The irony is most actors I know are terrible liars, because we are usually always in pursuit of something truthful.
Lucy’s complexities are easier to find when I can admit to myself that my truth and hers often align, insofar as: she can love, and also be scared of, the same person. She can love, and also be scared of, herself. She can be ambitious and self-determining, while she is nurturing and self-sacrificing for her family. She can know tremendous poverty and harm, while also knowing tremendous advantage and generosity, and both those can lead her to the same place – of genuine curiosity and wonder about the people around her. She can suffer, and also good things can happen to her, and she can be amazed by both.
We are all that complex, in truth. But we live in systems that ask us to choose one over the other. That’s what good art can be for, I think: to remind us the choice is not one or the other, but rather the choice is how we navigate many truths at once, and integrate them.
Lucy’s character goes through an emotional journey, particularly with her mother. What drew you to this deeply personal narrative?
Maev: The first time I read the script, I finished it in one sitting at around 2:30am. My daughter had to be up at 7:30 for school, but I couldn’t stop. Each day of exploring this world since, I have been freshly struck by the HONESTY in Strout’s characters – moments of truth so familiar and relatable – from my own family’s midwest American context, or my own rural childhood – to her surgical smart-hearted observations of what it honestly FEELS like to be a daughter, a mother, to be a woman artist courageously asking to be taken seriously, to be a stranger, to be a person alive to the mysteries of the world, despite all the damage it’s done to her. I am thankful to have her honesty to return to, in this work.
The play revolves around memory and reflection. How do you, as an actress, convey those subtle shifts between past and present?
Maev: It’s a bit of a cheat of an answer, but I think we are all doing this all day long, every day. Though many of us are striving to be in the present and to see the world with fresh eyes as much as we can – in truth is we are constantly processing what we see and experience through memory, from our very young selves to our adolescent selves and beyond. I think Lucy does this too. I’ve done several plays about memory and I find the only key is to keep them as present as possible, to keep freshly discovering and learning the meaning of a memory in its re-encounter, and letting the ‘pennies drop’ in real time on the stage. Theatre dies when it becomes reportage, the goal is to take the audience gently by the hand and have them discover it all with me – live, in the moment they’re there, sharing space with all the other audience doing the same.
My Name is Lucy Barton it’s just you on stage. What are the challenges and rewards of performing such an intimate, one-person show?
Maev: Well honestly some sheer stamina, health, courage, devotion and faith are required! There is nowhere to hide and no breaks to be taken! But the truth is – I’m not alone.
The great Jackie Maxwell the director and I have taken each moment out of its context, looked at every side of it and then put it back in its place in a way that serves the story that we hope the audience will walk with me. We built it all together. And then our designers watch us work, and also live with the text, and then bring their own tremendous voices to build the world.
This world is much inside Lucy’s head – our production therefore is also inside the heads of our whole creative team – everyone brings their own version of memory and relationship and maternity in their paintboxes and then we all paint together. And thank goodness for long-suffering and inspired stage managers who will ride the whole journey with me. But mostly, I’m waiting for the audience in a show like this. It simply does not exist until it is understood and received by the audience. As a performer in most of my shows, but especially in the solo work I’ve done, I’m not waiting to speak, rather I’m waiting to hear and feel you, the audience. We will build it together, this world inside my head, so it can leave inside yours.
Do you have a favourite moment or line from the play that feels particularly meaningful or powerful to perform?
Maev: These are spoilers alerts, haha! But a secret pleasure for me is there are several moments when I’m in the world of the mother character when I feel my grandmother Dorothy and my Aunts Barbara and Peg come through me. They could all be Strout characters in the most wonderful way, and I can hear their voices in my mouth. It gives me the wonderful shivers.
What do you hope audiences will take away after seeing this play?
Maev: Among many, many other comforts and discomforts, I hope we are reminded to value the time we’re given with even the most difficult people we love, to remember that something can be learned or gained by being present, by risking contact, by forgiving oneself and others (with proper boundaries of course). But mostly, that “we only have one story – just one story that we just try to tell over and over. And that’s all right.”
My Name is Lucy Barton runs October 18th through November 3rd at the Bluma Appel Theatre (27 Front St. E.). Tickets are available starting at $48 at canadianstage.com
Thank you Maev!