BROADWAY: 'MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON' MAKES LAURA LINNEY GLOW

A HOSPITAL ROOM WITH A VIEW Laura Linney, right, and the Chrysler Building in “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” now at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater..

LUCY BARTON IS SICK. Some mysterious infection that her doctors are trying to figure out. Lucy (Laura Linney), a semi-successful New York writer, is going to be in the hospital for a while — nine weeks, it turns out. Her husband has an honest-to-God hospital phobia, so he won’t be visiting. She misses her little daughters too. But she does have a surprise visitor: her mother (also played by Linney), whom she hasn’t seen or talked to in years. And after spending a little time with Mom, we see exactly why.

GET IT WHILE YOU CAN Linney as a woman with a diagnosis of terminal cancer in Showtime’s series “The Big C” (2010-13).

EDITOR’S NOTE: The trouble with any one-actor, one-act, one-set show is that there aren’t a lot of photo possibilities. So just for variety, here are some other pictures of Linney, whose 56th birthday is this month. She’s making her 12th appearance on Broadway (yielding her four Tony nominations, so far, and a Drama Desk Award).

THE BYRDES Jason Bateman and Linney in Netflix’s series “Ozark,” a crime drama series about money laundering in the Heartland. Season 3 begins on March 27, 2020.

MOUSE AND MARY ANN Marcus D’Amico and Linney in the original “Tales of the City” mini-series (1993), set in 1970s San Francisco and based on Armistead Maupin’s work. Linney looks like a baby because she was still in her 20s.

FIRST-LADY FASHION Linney as Abigail Adams in HBO’s “John Adams” (2008). Paul Giamatti played her husband, the second president of the United States.

LUCY, IT SEEMS, GREW up in a physically abusive Midwestern family so poor that there was no TV in the house. The family apparently didn’t pay their utilities bills either, because the house was so cold that young Lucy escaped to the warm, cozy local library. And accidentally became educated. And transformed.

When I first read descriptioniptions of “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” I thought that when her mother came to visit her hospital room, she was some sort of apparition. But no, she’s quite real. She’s flown to the big city from Illinois and has planted herself in the room’s single visitor chair. Linney plays her with a farm-country twang and a demeanor that says everything about her anger toward the world.

The London critics loved the play when Linney and her director, Richard Eyre, did it there in 2018. “It’s a story full of mysterious resonances,” Richard Billington wrote in The Guardian. The overall lesson, he said: “Even if you totally reinvent yourself, your past is inescapable.”

SICK AND THE CITY Linney in the New York production. Video design is by Luke Halls.

New York critics have been enthusiastic too. In his New York Times review, Ben Brantley wrote a love letter to Linney, calling her “the most translucent figure now on a New York stage.” In fact, “luminous” seems to be the adjective most often used to describe Linney in this particular role.

“Feelings seem to register on her face before her thoughts have a chance to catch up with them,” Brantley continued, “so that we know when she’s hurting or happy almost before she does.”

The dissenters were Helen Shaw, the new theater critic for New York magazine and Vulture (her review’s headline referred to the play as “a glum, gray dud”), and Peter Marks of The Washington Post.

If you didn’t read Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton novel, you may still know her work. She won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for “Olive Kitteridge,” which became a highly praised 2014 HBO mini-series with Frances McDormand in the title role.

MARRIAGE STORY Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins in HBO’s “Olive Kitteridge” (2014), based on Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. The two-part movie won eight Emmys, including awards for both stars and one for Jane Anderson’s adaptation.

“My Name Is Lucy Barton,” by Elizabeth Strout, adapted by Rona Munro, directed by Richard Meyer, Samuel J. Friedman Theater, 261 West 47th Street, manhattantheatreclub.com. 1 hour 30 minutes (no intermission). Opened on Jan. 15, 2020. Limited run. Closes on Feb. 29.