A sincerely rendered approval-slash-redemption piece

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A sincerely rendered approval-slash-redemption piece appeared in last Sunday's New York Times, with Charles Isherwood lauding the talents of Elizabeth Berkley and her work in Scott Elliott's revival of David Rabe's Hurlyburly. "I hereby spread the word that [Berkley] is pretty darn good," he wrote. "You may have already heard that virtually everyone is terrific in this much-acclaimed production. That Ms. Berkley holds her own among this skilled company of scene- stealers (i.e., Ethan Hawke, Josh Hamilton, Wallace Shawn) is a testament to how much her talent has grown since her appearance in [a certain] monumentally bad movie. As Bobbie, a 'balloon dancer' who gets more than she bargained for on a joyride with a frustrated actor, the statuesque Ms. Berkley is like a big, battered Barbie doll, a bruised good-time girl who, contrary to expectations, turns out to have a more reliable moral compass than almost anyone else onstage. Ms. Berkley handles the more baroque stretches of Mr. Rabe's dialogue with aplomb, and strikes a deeply poignant note in the play's second act, when Bobbie interrupts a drug-induced, nihilistic reverie from Mr. Hawke's character with a morsel of humanistic truth: Life may be a big, empty lie, but that's no excuse for being mean to your friends."

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