Description

Frank’s Home by Richard Nelson

Richard Nelson’s lean, smart, incisive FRANK’S HOME, is not the first play to tap into a hubristic but wearying architect in his waxing years, increasingly preferring buildings to people, battling against parasites, real and imagined, in an attempt to maintain and burnish is artistic legacy. Henrik Ibsen did that more than a century ago with THE MASTER BUILDER. And this drama isn’t even the first to cast Wright in such a role. But none of these previous works quite achieved what Nelson achieves here–a thoroughly invigorating, tightly focused piece of Chekhovian drama, wherein chatter about work and art, petty domestic acts and personal bickering patently fail to mask deep vulnerability, resent and existential despair. It’s a sophisticated play that reveals a lot about the architect’s lot, but it does not get stuck within those boundaries.
Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

The theater critics, of course, will have the ultimate say on FRANK’S HOME, but for this architecture critic, the play is fascinating because it makes two long-departed architectural giants of Chicago, Wright and Louis Sullivan, come vividly to life. In doing so, the play burrows deep into the troubled souls of these two geniuses, especially Wright’s, revealing that even creative demigods possess all-too-human frailties and foibles. Blair Kamin, Architecture Critic, Chicago Tribune

Nelson has a real feel for his characters’ emotional hunger and resentments.And] the irony in Nelson’s play is as clear as a prairie vista: Wright built many houses, yet he never was able to create a secure home for himself. As he admits, he had no gift for people; he was an artist forever obsessed with a ‘moral quest’ for that abstract notion he refers to as ‘the beautiful.’
Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun Times