In 2016, the playwright and film-maker Kenneth Lonergan released the film Manchester by the Sea, a devastating and beautifully detailed portrait of a grief-stricken man, played by Casey Affleck; both Affleck’s performance and Lonergan’s screenplay went on to win Academy awards. That same year, a different Lonergan drama about grief received far less attention, as his play Hold on to Me Darling premiered off-Broadway, with Timothy Olyphant playing a world-famous country singer reeling from the recent loss of his mother. Still Lonergan’s most recent produced play, Hold on to Me Darling returns to New York for a limited engagement with about half the original cast intact, but now featuring Adam Driver in the role originated by Olyphant.
Superficially, Olyphant sounds like a better fit to play Strings McCrane, a singer who returns to his small Tennessee hometown for his mother’s funeral, and starts seriously toying with the idea of sticking around, possibly abdicating his life as a musician and popular movie star. No contemporary figure particularly comes to mind as equally successful in mega-budget sci-fi movies and down-home country records, but then, Lonergan seems more interested in fame as a state of mind than the particulars of McCrane’s career. This approach makes Driver surprisingly convincing, even if he doesn’t read quite as folksy as Olyphant probably did. (Having appeared in both Inside Llewyn Davis and a trilogy of Star Wars movies aids his credibility.)
Moreover, Driver has the magnetism to draw all eyes in his direction whenever he’s on stage, which is in almost every scene of Hold on to Me Darling. Though he’s obviously an effective screen presence, sometimes it seems as if his particular physicality – the way he can look both rugged and fumbling at the same time, as in a running bit with Strings hanging up a cordless phone that initially made me wonder if it was an ad-lib – is made for commanding the stage without fuss. He’s especially adept at navigating the intentional, often oddly delightful choppiness between his character’s sadness and his comic, sometimes self-centered exasperation. Manchester had its moments of surprising humor, intentionally and sometimes thrillingly bumping up against moments of unbearable sadness; Darling has more overtly comedic passages, though its laughs still derive more from particular phrasings or irrational reactions than jokes.
Comparisons between the two works may not seem fair, but they are instructive in terms of their lead characters: Affleck’s Lee grapples with a tragedy so immense that it constantly and understandably threatens to overwhelm him. Driver’s Strings, meanwhile, is facing the unexpected death of an older parent; still damaging, of course, but without quite the same level of shock – which means that his grief is not too insurmountable to make it into a vehicle for his own, sometimes narcissistic hang-ups. This comes through in a pair of relationships: One with Nancy (Heather Burns), a friendly masseuse who happens to treat Strings in the immediate aftermath of his mother’s death, forging a connection that might not otherwise seem so intense; and another with his “second cousin twice removed” Essie (Adelaide Clemens). Essie became close with Strings’s mother before her death, and it’s hard to tell if Lonergan realizes that “twice removed” really should indicate a separation of another decade or two between her and Strings. (He’s about 40, while she seems to be in her 20s; “once removed” seems more likely to cover that age gap.) The point, however, is to place enough distance between Strings and Essie to make their feelings suitably confusing and ambiguous.
Well, ambiguous on Essie’s end, at least. Strings’s tendency to make big, sometimes contradictory gestures – romantic and otherwise – might seem maddeningly flaky in the hands of another actor; Driver makes clear the mixture of stubbornness, hard work, and doofus-y pampering that creates these impulses, and with them, a man who doesn’t realize the extent to which he’s running from himself. The other actors are uniformly strong, but Lonergan’s script doesn’t always take such care with their characters. Some skew a little cartoony, like Nancy offering that Strings’s mother “makes a lovely corpse” at the funeral, or the colorful variations of “Jesus Christ” issued by Strings’s brother Duke (CJ Wilson); others, like Essie, aren’t necessarily afforded the time necessary to maximize their emotional impact.
Yet despite a few moments that seem underworked, Hold on to Me Darling does ultimately take its time, running 160 minutes, and does end powerfully, almost on a more instinctive level than a purely dramatic one. As with other Lonergan plays like This Is Our Youth and Lobby Hero, the live tonal shifts lend it an electricity that’s hard to reproduce on film – and Driver plugs straight in.
