Play’s painful truth

“NIGHTINGALE” was no tea party. Nor for the faint of heart. Rather than “banal,” as reviewer Charles McNulty says [“Lynn Redgrave Throws a Tea Party,” Oct. 17], it was hard-hitting, revealing painful truths. Yes, it lacks the splashy big names that McNulty suggests were missing. And that’s precisely the art of Lynn Redgrave’s masterpiece.

She wrote a quiet piece about her not-at-all famous grandmother. There was nothing bizarre, glamorous or particularly exciting to draw us into fantasy and shelter us from the reality of our own painful lives that was hers. All of the frivolity, the high drama, was stripped away, leaving bare the stuff of life.

McNulty suggests that “Nightingale” doesn’t meet the Taper’s standards as being “a bastion of serious playwriting, with big ideas and themes artfully crafted.” Hush, and listen.

SUZANNE J. MARKS

Los Angeles