[As published in West Palm Beach Magazine.]
In Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles comedy drama, the journey is long for Vera Joseph [Patricia Conolly] and her grandson Leo Joseph-Connell [Gabriell Salgado], but a meaningful one. Opening the new season at Palm Beach Dramaworks, and directed by J. Barry Lewis, this play is unclear where it sits in time. However, it focuses on the strength of family relationships, and how time and distance can easily break that strong tie.
4000 Miles premiered Off-Broadway at The Duke Theater in New York City on June 20, 2011, under the direction of Andre Bishop, Bernard Gersten, and Paige Evans. It didn’t take long for members of the media to cleverly define Herzog’s humor and honesty as a rarity. “A family play that avoids sentimentality or sitcom shtick,” reported Time Magazine then. While The New York Times praised it as “truthful and touching and fine,” and the Wall Street Journal called it “a small-scale character study reminiscent of Chekhov in its emphasis on personality over plot.”
And now, under the direction of Palm Beach Dramaworks’ longstanding director, Lewis takes this all-together wonderful drama and draws it out to make a lasting impression on its audience. And while the play is performed without an intermission, it is vastly engaging, filled with comic relief that seeks to bring laughter out of calamity. Very worth sitting through.
Herzog has an amazing new voice. A grad of Yale School of Drama, she is a playwright that came onto the scene in the mid 2000s. While she published other works before 4000 Miles, things really began to click for her when she looked at members of her own family—people who had stories that she thought could be told in dramatic, interesting, and engaging ways—to tell her story. The character of Vera, the grandmother played by Conolly, is based on the playwright’s own grandmother. And the role of the young man, Leo, is sort of loosely based on the role of a cousin that she had.
4000 Miles is a fascinating story of three generations coming together: Emerging. Discovering. Learning and finding new ways to communicate with one another, and hopefully moving forward to live their own journeys. Read more...