Lisa’s flaxen hair and wholesome eagerness do not quite match the knotty intensity of her story about a girl suffering from an eating disorder. “Almost without exception my students tend to look like their stories,” Ruth says dryly, clearly implying that she expected Lisa to resemble nightshade rather than a sunflower.
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“So am I not a serious-looking person?” Lisa asks falteringly.
“No, you’re not,” comes the blunt reply.
But Lisa’s talent intrigues Ruth, and as their relationship evolves — Lisa jumps at the chance to become her assistant — Ruth also comes to see in her protégée a version of the unworldly aspirant to the citadel of art that she once was herself, a nobody from Detroit who found herself sitting across from the poet Delmore Schwartz in a West Village tavern. Ruth’s wary demeanor begins to thaw when she reveals to Lisa the story of her affair with the poet, who was by then “descending rapidly,” as Ruth puts it.
As Ruth reflects on the past, Ms. Lavin herself seems to shed years, as the regenerating warmth of nostalgia flows like new blood in Ruth’s veins. The voice, normally tinged with complaint or suspicion, softens and slows into an almost hypnotic purr; the eyes gleam with youthful excitement and vivid pain as she recalls the highs and lows.
“I’m not particularly proud of all that happened and yet ... it was my shining moment,” Ruth says, and Ms. Lavin invests the words with a piercing truth. This moment of intimacy between mentor and protégée will prove to be a fateful passage in their relationship.
Mr. Margulies, the Pulitzer Prize winner whose “Time Stands Still” preceded “Collected Stories” at the same theater, making this spring season a miniature festival of his work, has found fertile material in the struggles of the creative classes to reconcile the demands of ambition with the exigencies of life. His breakthrough play, “Sight Unseen,” considered the exacting cost of success for a painter, and “Time Stands Still” explored the widening emotional gulf between a photographer and a journalist with diverging views about their vocations.