Semi-detached theater

It’s been what they politely term a “thin” season on Broadway this year, a season far more memorable for its lows than for its highs. When set against the middlebrow melodrama of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and the sleepy bromides of Whoopi Goldberg’s white comedy, the breathtaking stupidity of some of the season’s more ill-fated offerings seemed unforgettable indeed.

Kicking off the season at the Music Box Theatre was Alone Together, a play about a middle-aged couple’s inability to rid their tasteful suburban house of a passel of grown-up children. Bred in the Theater of Empathy tradition, whose purpose is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to Topical Anxiety, Alone Together gave the audience a chance to see itself in the same old light the bedside table lamp has shed on all those eiderdown conversations about “where we went...