"What is the weight of a lie?" asks Judith Light in Neil LaBute's dramatic monologue, All the Ways to Say I Love You, at the Lucille Lortel Theater. The question weighs in like The Merchant of Venice's pound of flesh in this MCC theater production: it refers to an outsized guilt in this one woman tour de force. In her recent Broadway role in Therese Raquin, Light is the object of guilt, a mother betrayed for her money. Here the guilt is all hers, for a sexual dalliance with a palpable result, a secret that weighs in on her lean frame, that she divulges, but to whom?
"Conscience doth make cowards of us all," said the bard, and maybe this is what LaBute had in mind in creating Mrs. Johnson, a high school teacher reveling in the memory of great sex, rating it in one word: WOW. The play flies by so fast, and much of the credit for the pace and performance goes to Leigh Silverman's superb direction. On opening night, Judith Light exulted at the Sambasushi celebration, a diva in red transformed from her somber monochromatic teacher garb. The hardest part, she said, was memorizing her lines while prepping for a play in LA with Al Pacino. "He's a doll," she said
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