Comments (0) Best Actress in a Drama - 2007
Trina Magness
Williams's Talk to Me Like the Rain is more a tone poem than a play, a small, wistful piece between a woman and a man who has just returned to her after a several-day absence. Urged by him to speak, she launches into a long monologue beginning, "I want to go away. I want to go away." The woman imagines herself living in a town by the sea, growing older and more frail until she dwindles to almost nothing and is blown away by the wind. Trina Magness has a beautiful voice and a feeling for language. In her mouth, the speech sounded like a solitary flute or the thin, sad strains of Erik Satie. She played the role with such feeling -- now and then emitting a burbling, demented little laugh -- that what could have been an exercise in self-pitying solipsism became a lament for the essential isolation of every human being on earth.
