Tracy Letts’s magic touch
Tracy Letts’s Mary Page Marlowe is a biographical portrait of an emotionally damaged mother struggling with romantic and family problems. Susan Sarandon shares the lead with four other actresses which makes the show a little hard to follow. And the timeline is jumbled up so that the audience has to find its bearings at the start of each new episode. Why? Perhaps to give the material a complexity it doesn’t deserve. We first meet our heroine, aged 40 (played by Andrea Riseborough), as she tells her kids that they’re moving to Kentucky without their dad. This unpromising scene is hilarious because the word ‘Kentucky’ is repeated so often that it
