Three short stories by Flannery O’Connor

Three short stories by Flannery O’Connor, currently at the New York Theatre Workshop, make for that dreaded, drawn out evening of theatre. The stories are performed in their entirety, as originally written. So, the actors assume the mechanics of the narrative, referring to their characters in the third person, then shifting into live action or vise versa.

The stories themselves depict the lives of Southern folk, post World War II, with O’Connor’s prized sense of naturalism and symbolism. In EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE, the evening’s final play and the title of the production, a white woman and a black woman meet on a bus. Each wears the same outrageous green and purple hat. The symbolism of the hat demonstrates O’Connor’s awareness that given the opportunity some black folk would want the same things and choose the same things as a lot of white folk. As things move up, they meet, for better or for worse.

In the play, A VIEW OF THE WOODS a 79-year-old grandfather finds fault with his favorite granddaughter when he notices how her father beats her and how she says nothing. Sadly, the grandfather who "meant to teach the child spirit by example" offers her the irreversible lesson with his own hands. And in GREENLEAF an older woman despairs at the treatment she receives from all the men around her.

As told, the stories are laborious and difficult to follow in their passive literary voice. The presentation leaves us betwixt and between a boring evening of theatre and O’Connor’s short stories, which are not always readily available, even to her readers.

That’s This Week Off-Broadway. I’m Isa Goldberg.