‘GOODNIGHT Children Everywhere” is a vintage song from World War II about a mother comforting her absent children. It’s also the title of Richard Nelson’s 1997 play,which opened last night at Playwrights Horizons’ Anne G. Wilder Theater, about four English siblings who have lost their parents and, in a sense, their bearings during the war.
It’s 1945 and the children, now young adults, have returned for the first time in five years to the old family flat in south London. There is much fussing over Peter (17 and the youngest), who had been shipped off to western Canada but now returns with a funny accent and his new status as a man.
The three women’s lives – Betty’s a spinster nurse, pregnant Ann is married to a doctor of 50 and Vi is a failed actress – are dreary and unexciting. The traumas of the war years seem to have fogged up their souls.
For a longish time the direction, by Nelson himself, is sluggish and stiff; and the players seem trapped in their Brit accents and 1940s flowered prints.
But things perk up when Peter takes a bath in front of the very pregnant Ann. As the title song plays on the radio, they remember their dead parents, then turn their attention to each other. From this point on, the sexual electricity between Ann and Peter – separated so long they are like strangers – makes Thomas Lynch’s crowded set a mine field of furtive embraces and guilty separations.
As Peter, Chris Stafford suddenly grows older and stronger; the boy’s awkward sweetness becomes a hovering delicacy, an articulate anger, a brave grab at happiness. Kali Rocha’s Ann is likewise transformed into an eloquent woman lit by a overpowering love both sisterly and sexual.
Meanwhile, Betty (the attractive and intelligent Robin Weigert) rejects an obnoxious doctor and Vi gets a part but only after prostituting herself. Played too maniacally by Heather Goldenhersh, Vi has some of Nelson’s clunkiest lines, like “There is no greater curse … than to tie together once and forever sex and death.”
In the final scene everybody rushes off to sing “Goodnight Children Everywhere” to Ann’s new baby while Ann and Peter sit alone remembering their parents and hopelessly loving each other.
It’s heartbreaking moments like this that raise the play from soap opera to the heights of something like art.
Playwrights Horizons’ Anne G. Wilder Theater, 416 W. 42nd St., between Ninth and 10th avenues, (212) 279-4200.