"Time Stands Still' in New York

The playwright Donald Margulies likes to flirt— with serious social issues, with serious visual art, with serious characters who have serious problems. The trouble is, he isn't serious about any of it. He's a once-over-lightly kind of guy who leaves suggested ideas underdeveloped, and creates complex characters who turn out to be merely plot complications. All these signature flaws are visible in his enjoyable but unsatisfying Time Stands Still, which just opened on Broadway after its premiere in L.A.

The central character of this four-hander is Sarah (the superb Laura Linney), an adrenaline junkie photographer who specializes in covering war with her longtime partner James (Brian D'Arcy James), a journalist. Sarah and James are not domestic people: Name a global horror show and they were there.

When we meet them, they're back in their little apartment in New York; Sarah, just home from the hospital after a nearly fatal roadside bombing in Iraq, is scarred, wearing a brace, and limping. James has been home a few months longer— since he suffered a psychiatric meltdown after a group of women blew up before his eyes.

Two kinds of women

Their editor and friend, Richard (Eric Bogosian) brings his inappropriately young girlfriend, Mandy (Alicia Silverstone) to meet them, and the couples become uneasy friends; Mandy, who's not-too-bright but feel-the-joy sweet, finds her true calling as a mother.

Margulies's ideas about women seem shockingly retrograde: Either they're young, nubile and maternal or they're middle-aged, brainy and heartless. Every snippet we hear about all the other women in all their lives fits one of these two categories.

The most interesting issue the play addresses is how war photographers just keep taking pictures of such extreme suffering without trying to help. Sarah explains that once she looks through the camera's rectangular window, "Time stands still" and everything falls away, silent and emotionless. This life-denying distancing is necessary, she explains: "The camera's there to record life, not to change it."

James adds that war correspondents provide necessary information. In a moment of crystalline clarity, Mandy replies, "And what am I supposed to do with this information?"

Bourgeois soap opera

Ultimately, Time Stands Still isn't about war or journalistic responsibility or selling out, but about relationships; the play devolves disappointingly into a soap opera, with Richard and Mandy singing bourgeois backup.

Linney's cool, blonde looks, her unmadeup face and scarred skin provide the outline of a character the actor fills in with wry subtlety, conveying Sarah's intelligence, courage and the kind of self-awareness that knows how little she understands herself, a "ghoul with a camera," "living off the suffering of strangers."

The others in this starry cast are perfectly adequate but predictable: Bogosian is always the same whether he's playing the devil in a Guirgis play or the captain on "Law and Order" or a magazine editor in love. Silverstone, seen most often in profile, scrunches up her face as her one expression, and D'Arcy James conveys sincerity without a trace of his character's recent breakdown, his former toughness or his subsequent guilt and shame.

In other words, this play is shallow and mute about a topic we are profoundly interested in; it's hard not to wonder, watching the recent news, how all those hundreds of reporters and photographers managed to land in Haiti and travel through the devastated country when planes full of medicine and food couldn't.