On learning of his mother’s death, country music icon Strings McCrane (Adam Driver) finds himself in an existential tailspin. The only way out, he decides, is to abandon superstardom in favor of the simple life, so he moves back to his hometown in Tennessee. The simple life turns out to be anything but simple in this brilliantly observed tragicomedy, as the consequences of Strings’s success and mind-bending effects of his fame prove all but impossible to outrun.
Other than a few cast changes, most notably Driver in the role first played by Timothy Olyphant, the show is pretty much what it was when it debuted at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2016. The physical production looks as if it had been preserved since then in mothballs, with the same cramped, slowly revolving set by Walt Spangler. The few tweaks to the script are almost invisible. Neither Lonergan nor the director, Neil Pepe, seems to have felt the need for refinement.
It’s not that Hold On To Me Darling – opening tonight Off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre – is bad (it isn’t, though there are moments that do their best to convince otherwise). Confounding might be a more accurate description, starting with this: In the eight years since its last Off Broadway production, directed, like this one, by Neil Pepe, how could the supremely gifted Lonergan (This Is Our Youth, The Waverly Gallery, Lobby Hero) not come to some decision about what, exactly, this shaggy dog is supposed to be about?
2016 | Off-Broadway |
World Premiere Off-Broadway Production Off-Broadway |
2024 | Off-Broadway |
Off-Broadway Revival Off-Broadway |
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