Iraq’s Toll on Journalists, and Those Who Love Them

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THEATER REVIEW | 'TIME STANDS STILL'

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Published: February 14, 2009

LOS ANGELES — The risks and responsibilities of a life in photojournalism are the subject of “Time Stands Still,” the reflective but low-key new drama by Donald Margulies that opened on Wednesday night at the Geffen Playhouse here. Mr. Margulies, the author of the Pulitzer Prize winner “Dinner With Friends” and “Sight Unseen,” among other plays, has always been interested in the ways that the passage of time and the arc of a career imprint their stresses upon relationships. Whether they are rushing headlong toward achievement or settling into diminished expectations, people who have found an easy rhythm with a lover or spouse in their youth may begin to move through life at a different speed, and connections are lost.

Life has suddenly and traumatically stalled for the couple at the center of the new play, the photographer Sarah (Anna Gunn) and her reporter partner, James (David Harbour). Sarah has been seriously wounded while reporting from Iraq. Her beautiful face is streaked with scar tissue, and she has an arm and a leg both temporarily out of commission.

Her mood is antsy and glum, and she bridles at James’s protectiveness. The appendage that she really misses is the camera affixed to her arm that gave life an urgent purpose. James’s anxiousness is partly the residue of guilt; he left Iraq weeks before the attack, after the horror and stress became too much for him.

Sarah is less than welcoming when her old friend and colleague Richard (Robin Thomas), the photo editor of the weekly newsmagazine she worked for, arrives at her Brooklyn loft. She takes an instant antipathy to his new girlfriend, Mandy (Alicia Silverstone), a bubbly and much younger woman who arrives with a couple of tacky balloons ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/theater/reviews/14time.html?_r=1&ref=theater

[hope1954]

1. Real Journalism

Still stands in this country