The New York Times - Somewhat Recommended
"...An untethered play about unmoored lives...Throughout this production, directed a shade too tentatively by Lynne Meadow, Ms. Lavin's poses unfailingly match, and even amplify, Mr. Greenberg's exquisite prose...I wish the play that surrounds her were more compellingly realized...As a mystery drama, 'Our Mother's Brief Affair' never acquires much urgency, despite the fretful, fine-grained ambivalence of all the performances."
NY Daily News - Somewhat Recommended
"...With signature style, wry wit and an irresistible glint in her eye, Lavin makes Anna Cantor a force to be reckoned with. Lavin can do that in her sleep. Even so, the play is a snooze...Greenberg writes sharp and smart dialogue. Lynne Meadow is an efficient director. The cast is fine, but can only do so much with a script that is undercooked and overwritten at the same time."
Hollywood Reporter - Not Recommended
"...It takes some doing to stifle the prickly humor of Linda Lavin, but 'Our Mother's Brief Affair' makes her character both an unreliable narrator and one who's astringent to the point of unpleasantness...While Meadow's actors are all quite accomplished, they struggle to find any heart in characters so unrelentingly 'written' that it sucks the life out of them, giving us no reason to care."
Vulture - Not Recommended
"...The moral balance fails, making 'Our Mother's Brief Affair' seem uncharacteristically cheap or desperate, a way of cribbing drama from an impeccable source - history - instead of growing it natively. Greenberg seems to sense this, or at least his characters do, because he and they spend the rest of the play scrambling to absorb the blow by making excuses where possible and, where not, trying to top it with a secondary secret."
Variety - Not Recommended
"...Not even the sainted Linda Lavin can save the deeply unpleasant character she plays in 'Our Mother's Brief Affair,' a lazy play by Richard Greenberg. Stubbornly lacking in dramatic tension, the uneventful narrative features a mean-spirited woman who may or may not be on her deathbed, recounting a closely held secret to her disagreeable grown children."
Entertainment Weekly - Somewhat Recommended
"...Greenberg's laugh-filled but insubstantial new comedy...Late in the play, Greenberg rewards Lavin with a meaty memory-within-a-memory monologue. But such sudden, overwhelming sadness is too much, too late. A Richard Greenberg play is theatrical comfort food; this is his 11th MTC production. Somehow, 'Our Mother's Brief Affair' got overcooked."
Newsday - Recommended
"...Like so many of Greenberg's chamber-sized social studies, 'Our Mother's Brief Affair' is witty and elegantly precise about funny, flawed individuals with a sense of history beyond the latest headline...Greenberg takes us on unexpected turns in what sound at first to be ordinary family secrets. Meadow brings a tender mercilessness to the style."
amNY - Not Recommended
"...An underwhelming dramatic comedy...The play has witty lines and a few surprises, but it's also sluggish, messy and short on plot. Greenberg's attempts to play with time and dramatic structure come off as labored. Meadow's staging is generally flat."
NBC New York - Somewhat Recommended
"...Greenberg's imperfect 2009 play hinges on a mother's deathbed confession to her grown children-the affair of the title. The notion of "legacy" weighs heavily in the drama, which touches on themes such as the suburban dream, and the desire, when one's life is nearing its end, "to be known.""
Time Out New York - Highly Recommended
"...Directed with canny ambiguity by Lynne Meadow, Our Mother's Brief Affair leaves you to wonder how much this scandal has been retouched. But there is no doubt as to the casual mastery that Lavin, at 78, brings to the part. Shifting in and out of the past, elevating one-liners to three-dimensionality, she brings a lifetime of command to the stage. She owns this part and claims it like nobody's business but her own.
The Wrap - Not Recommended
"...Neither the petulant performances by Kate Arrington and Greg Keller nor the arch writing by Greenberg is compelling. The five-minute history lesson, however, mesmerizes because the bare facts continue to astound more than a half century later...Likewise, character traits are thrown out and dismissed...'Affair' is nearly a drama-less drama. Nearly every conflict presented is resolved by someone on stage telling us how it is resolved."
Financial Times - Somewhat Recommended
"...The play ought to be an intricate study of personal and political betrayal but, though ably directed by Lynne Meadow, never quite delivers on the promise of its material..Greenberg's inexhaustible supply of polished one-liners makes this an enjoyable evening nonetheless - as does Lavin's performance, which culminates in a monologue that captures truths about love and death at which the rest of the play merely clutches."
The Guardian - Not Recommended
"...The playwright Richard Greenberg has a flair for middle-class aphorisms...If this were enough to sustain the two-hour's traffic of our stage, then 'Our Mother's Brief Affair' would be scintillating stuff. It is not. Unfocused, anemic and astonishingly trivial, this drama of family and memory has somehow found its way to Manhattan Theatre Club's Broadway berth...It's hard to imagine an affair torrid enough to shake up a play this smug."
Talkin Broadway - Not Recommended
"...Curious and frequently flavorless confection by Richard Greenberg...What does the alternately leaden and breezy piece mean when they're combined within the ripples of memory? There's no easy way to tell, and without Linda Lavin at the helm, there wouldn't be an especially compelling reason to investigate."
TheaterMania - Not Recommended
"..."It's disappointing when a play that is intelligently written and generally well-acted just doesn't coalesce. It's especially disappointing when the dramatist is Richard Greenberg, a premier theatrical chronicler of the Jewish-American family. His latest, 'Our Mother's Brief Affair' will no doubt appeal to certain people, especially with the sublime Linda Lavin in the title role. But even a performer as watchable as Lavin can't elevate this sluggish play into a compelling evening of theater."
Huffington Post - Not Recommended
"...Another geriatric comedy--of the genre popularly known as 'the Linda Lavin play'--pleasantly steaming along, courtesy of heavy lifting by Linda Lavin herself. Suddenly, a big mystery emerges; without said big mystery, there'd be little upon which to build the second act...If Mr. Greenberg was attempting to give us something with socio-politico-historical import, he has not convincingly done so."
Broadway Blog - Somewhat Recommended
"...Ultimately, Anna delivers a lengthy monologue, which allows Lavin her big moment as she explains the guilt that drove her into the affair, but it's just as contrived as the affair itself. Only Lavin's performance keeps the entire enterprise from disintegrating before our eyes. For those attending to see a star performance they'll certainly get one...Her costars, sorry to say, are unremarkable,...further demonstrating why 'Our Mother's Brief Affair" is, for better or worse, a star vehicle."
Theater Pizzazz - Not Recommended
"...Too much of the play is repetitive or unfulfilling; there's perhaps 60 minutes of really fine writing within these two hours, no matter how hard director Lynne Meadow tries to distract us."
WNBC - Somewhat Recommended
"...It's routine theater fodder, until the first act skids to a halt, lights come up and the kids break the fourth wall to explain that, to the best of their knowledge, the man their mother was caught up with was of some historical significance...It takes the generic, and I daresay hardly earth-shaking knowledge that a parent had an affair, and throws it up against a specific political event...It's a beautifully performed play."
