Review: Tuesdays With Morrie
Tuesdays With Morrie, written by Mitch Albom and Jeffrey Hatcher, produced by Bristol Riverside Theatre, reviewed by Wendy Rosenfield, directed by Susan Atkinson, featuring Richert Easley, Danny Vaccaro, set by Andrew Deppen
By Wendy Rosenfield
for the Inquirer
In Tuesdays with Morrie, now at the Bristol Riverside Theatre, sportswriter Mitch Albom visits weekly with his former professor, Morrie Schwartz. Their sessions, always heavy on life lessons, include one exchange in which the elder asks the angst-ridden younger a telling question. It’s not “Are you happy?” but “Are you at peace with yourself?”
The play follows Albom and Schwartz’s rekindled friendship until the latter’s death of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 1995. It’s sort of an anti-Godot, in which the big man’s arrival is certain, and every living moment, rather than divesting itself of meaning, becomes further freighted with what Schwartz calls aphorisms, and I’ll call platitudes. Example: “There’s no point in loving; loving is the point.”
This is a Morrie who’s happy, rather than at peace, a difference that requires a layer of disingenuousness. Maybe that’s the one some prefer to see. It surely smoothes Schwartz's long downward slide. But it also robs us of some depth, a reminder that finding inner peace can be hard work under the easiest circumstances, and under the toughest, truly heroic.