Time Stands Still

Rebecca Rocheford Davies in Time Stands Still.

By Elissa Blake

The central character of Donald Margulies’ play Time Stands Still is burdened with wounds collected during a mission in Iraq, but its author says it isn’t an Iraq War play. At heart, it’s about a relationship.

“It’s essentially a love story,” says Margulies. “The play is really about the choices that people make in life and how they deal with the question of how to be a moral person in this chaotic world of ours.”

Margulies is a Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist. He is also professor of English and Theatre Studies at Yale University. “I always get a little protective about the way in which the play is portrayed in the media because in America at least, there is ‘Iraq fatigue’ in popular culture. People have a certain level of ennui about it. So it’s not a war play, it’s a love story and it’s funny too.”

Written in 2008, Time Stands Still, which makes its Australian debut at the Darlinghurst Theatre this week [subs: it opened April 3], tells the story of Sarah, a photojournalist who comes within a whisker of being killed by a roadside bomb. The play begins just after her reporter boyfriend James (Richard Sydenham) brings her back from a hospital in Germany to their loft in Brooklyn, New York.

Up until now, this long-time couple has been shuttling between the world’s war zones, high on adventure and seriousness of purpose. But can they settle down to a “regular” life after all the chaos they have witnessed?

“I wanted to write something that was of the moment and in my world,” explains Margulies. “When you see people coping with those levels of strife and mayhem compared to the relative comfort and security that someone like myself enjoys, it gives me pause to think about the state of the world.”

Margulies says the character of Sarah was informed by – though not explicitly based on – one of his friends, the New York Times photojournalist Lynsey Addario, whose detention by forces loyal to Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi made world headlines last year.

“Lynsey’s experiences as a woman in a combat zone did serve as a kind of marker for me and she was a tremendous resource,” says Margulies. “She gave me something of a window into this world. I felt I hadn’t seen this kind of experience in a play before. You see it in film, but I thought it might be refreshing to see it on stage, and focused on a woman journalist, too.”

Donald Margulies (photo by Ethan Hill)

Margulies has a reputation for writing smart, funny, complicated women. “It’s an interesting niche,” he chuckles. “I like those kinds of women in life. I’m married to one, and I’m drawn to them in fiction.

“The role of Sarah is a wonderful challenge for an actress. She’s a character who can’t be reduced to a simple description. She’s intensely smart and we’re seeing her at a moment of extremis as she tries to put herself back together again after this traumatic experience. She’s a woman coming to terms with her vulnerability after a life in which she grew accustomed to not thinking about herself in those terms.”

Rebecca Rocheford Davies, who plays Sarah in this production by Kim Hardwick (who also directed Margulies’ play Dinner With Friends in 2006), agrees.

“It’s a brilliant role,” says the Minnesota-born, Sydney-based actress. “The writing is marvellously layered and she’s very complex. She’s seen a lot of terrible things in the world but then can’t let herself be affected by it or she won’t be able to do her job. The way she has desensitised herself has leaked into her relationships as well, but she’s still this really passionate person, in her work and in her life.”

Time Stands Still speaks accurately and tenderly about long-term relationships, says Rocheford Davies. “It’s that point when one person wants things to change and the other wants things to stay the same. Can it work?”

Time Stands Still, plays at the Darlinghurst Theatre from April 3-22. 

This story first appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald on April 5.