Midwest Premiere

In 1979 Washington D.C., socialite Hester Ferris throws posh dinner parties that can change the course of politics. But when her son turns up with an ambitious Reagan-ite girlfriend and a shocking new world view, it ignites a family divide that spans over 30 years and six presidential administrations. As power shifts from one generation to the next, a family struggles to maintain ties while on opposite sides of the partisan fence.

“Truly superb, deeply involving. A sharp commentary on Washington politics and personal behavior, then and now.”

- Chicago Tribune

Chicago Tribune

by Chris Jones
September 23, 2016
3.5 Stars

‘City of Conversation’: Politics get personal, beginning in 1979

…”The City of Conversation,” the truly superb, deeply involving 2014 play by Anthony Giardina about the death of inside-the-beltway conviviality, is set in the comfortable home of a Washington hostess and Democratic political fixer — she’s called Hester Ferris here and played at the Northlight Theatre by Lia Mortensen. It’s 1979, the beginning of the end, you might say. The first crack in the formidable Hester’s armor appears when her son Colin (Greg Matthew Anderson) arrives home from the London School of Economics with a new fiancee, Anna Fitzgerald (Mattie Hawkinson), whom his mother immediately recognizes as a dangerously ambitious climber. She’s also a conservative. Colin — a malleable child of privilege who lacks his mother’s drive and ideological determination — is entranced by Anna’s beauty and brains. Sides are taken.

…

So. There you have a very juicy, well-made play that is no font of formative experimentation but is nonetheless a rarity in American theater — a sharp commentary on Washington politics and personal behavior, then and now. Giardina clearly sympathizes most of all with Hester, who has to fend off this Minnesota Eve Harrington, but it’s not an adoring portrait nor a characterization oblivious to the flaws and inequalities of the old system. To its credit, this sharply written drama, justly acclaimed when it premiered at New York’s Lincoln Center, allows for the notion that all politics should be personal, especially since those legislative matters often make their way into the bedroom or the doctor’s office. And it also acknowledges the argument that the old ways of drinks and persuasion were anti-democratic and served no one but those sipping the drinks.

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Chicago Sun-Times

by Hedy Weiss
September 25, 2016
Highly Recommended

In ‘City of Conversation,’ a key to our political polarization

Why has this country become so ferociously polarized? And why has the American electoral landscape become so distressingly fraught, tattered and seemingly irreconcilable about so many things?

These are the questions addressed in “The City of Conversation,” the uncannily timely, uniquely balanced, multi-generational drama by playwright-novelist Anthony Giardina, now receiving a live-wire Midwest premiere at Northlight Theatre under the direction of Marti Lyons.

Making a clear-eyed assessment of the present as extracted from the not-so-distant past, Giardina homes in on the many reasons why the center has failed to hold, and why, since the 1960s, positions have become so entrenched, while the essential social glue that once made a certain amount of compromise possible has disappeared. To be sure, at certain points Giardina stretches things a bit to make his case, yet anyone who has witnessed the tension between friends and family members during the current election cycle might say he has not stretched things far enough. The so-called “culture wars,” that really have been raging since the 1960s, seem to be more heated than ever, with the front lines redrawn in ever starker ways.

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