Time Stands Still is Far from Static

Two restless souls--he a foreign correspondent, she a photojournalist--come back to their Brooklyn apartment after she gets hurt on the job in Donald Margulies' new play Time Stands Still. After a successful Broadway run through Manhattan Theater Company in the 2008-2009 season, it is now back after a summer hiatus. Sarah Goodwin (Laura Linney) has just woken from a coma after a roadside bomb flung her from her car, simultaneously killing her translator, Tariq. Wearing a leg brace and facial scabs, she limps around the apartment while her partner Jamie attends to her. But Sarah is also quick to shrug off special treatment, allowing her editor Richard (Eric Bogosian), and his new girlfriend Mandy (Christina Ricci). When they ask about the explosion, Sarah replies, "Occupational hazard," in a typically practical manner.

After the first two scenes, we may feel that we have all four of these characters figured out. Sarah is a cerebral world-saving workaholic; Jamie is her perfect counterpart as a romantic journalist; Richard is suffering from a midlife crisis, which involves getting together with Mandy, an unintellectual event planner.

Slowly, through incremental, well-paced steps, Donald Margulies reveals the back story behind Sarah's stoicism and Jamie's obsequiousness. Margulies peels back the layers of their personalities to reveal that things aren't as simple as they first appear. Margulies has mastered the art of exposition through convincing dialogue. It's not surprising that Time Stands Still earned him a Tony nomination for best play last year. Just like how a real couple might not dive into everything that they did while apart for work, it takes Sarah and Jamie some time to warm up to each other here.

When they do, things they want to say to each other seem to explode out of their mouths. Jamie proposes they get married after eight years of living together. He claims it's a good idea for hospital visitation rights while giving off the hint there's something lingering beneath the surface. Perhaps it's Sarah's affair with her translator, Tariq, which she reveals in the next line. Perhaps it's Jamie's own breakdown after seeing children explode in front of him, causing him to leave Sarah with Tariq in the first place. Is Jamie trying to redeem himself? Is he just insecure? And where does Sarah's hesitancy come from?

Margulies provides the answers to these questions in the second act without hitting the audience over the head with the characters' motivations. There are no sudden epiphanies or revelations. Rather, the characters figure themselves out at the same time as the audience. Sarah and Jamie realize that their real problem may be that they simply want different things. Jamie, to settle down, but Sarah to keep traveling. At the same time, Sarah's starting to question her own motives for her profession.

In one of the most moving monologues in the play, Sarah tells Jamie how she kept shooting film despite a woman's protests after an explosion in Mosul. "What I did was so wrong it was indecent...They didn't want me taking pictures. That was a sacred place to them...I live off the suffering of strangers." Meanwhile, Mandy is the perfect counterpoint to Sarah's worldviews. Looking at Sarah's pictures, Mandy starts to get upset. "Why didn't you help them?" she wants to know. Indeed, why don't we help the millions of poor people in the world, is one of the questions Time Stands Still asks us to consider. But the more important one is how does our answer to that question effect our relationships?