Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

“The Shape of Metal,” a three-person drama from Irish playwright Thomas Kilroy, lacks any real or compelling shape itself, alas. It mainly serves as a showcase for the formidable Roberta Maxwell, who plays a famed elderly sculptress fond of turbans, profane oaths, and salty meditations about her love life. Directed by the equally formidable actor Brian Murray, “The Shape of Metal” meanders leisurely around various clichéd conceptions of art and life: Maxwell’s Nell is the monster mother and devouring artist who thinks only of herself. Julia Gibson’s Judith is her constantly complaining daughter, and Molly Ward’s Grace is her victim daughter, touched in the head, subject to her mother’s will. No real conflict is played out amongst these women; nothing is at stake. Instead, we watch as Maxwell’s Nell acts larger than life, ruminates, wheezes, rolls her eyes, and tries to remember things. Towards the end, she has a gratuitous speech about how mediocre art is nowadays, and how it portends death, or the future rushing in on us, or some such nonsense.

The play goes on for two hours without ever making a compelling claim for our attention; Gibson and Ward are stuck with thankless roles. Though it’s called “The Shape of Metal,” Nell talks about working with stone, and we see one of her unfinished stone sculptures. In a flashback, we see Nell working with metal, but it’s unclear just when and why she switched material, if indeed she did. To cap things off, Nell tells a pointless story about Giacometti and Samuel Beckett getting into an argument about shoes. This is a lazy, windy play, but it must be conceded that Maxwell gives it her all. Let’s hope that next time she has shapelier material to work with.