A woman recovering from trauma of war

The coproduction of "Time Stands Still" that has been running at Delaware Theatre Company moves Tuesday to the stage of Act II Playhouse in Ambler. The move means minor changes, mostly because Ambler's theater is about a third the size of Wilmington's.

Dirk Durossette built his Brooklyn apartment scenery to be scaled back, and the cast has re-rehearsed in the new space. Here's an excerpt from Howard Shapiro's review, which ran last month when the coproduction opened.

In a beautifully wrought production, the play comes off as both realistic and deeply felt by its characters. Time Stands Still is about a complex woman - a news photographer (the excellent Susan McKey) much more at home on a battlefield than in the Brooklyn apartment she shares with a writer (Kevin Kelly), who often works abroad with her.

They've been traumatized - he has been home getting his head together after deadly chaos, and she's now home with a head and body full of shrapnel from a roadside bomb. Whether a woman who thrives on being in the midst of war, famine, and genocide could ever really come home to a conventional life is a question Donald Margulies' smart play raises.

Time Stands Still did very well on Broadway the last two seasons, produced by a group including Bud Martin, the artistic director of Act II. He directs the play with an eye for its everyday rhythms and its smooth story line about these two journalists, their editor (played by playwright Bruce Graham), and the editor's young love (Megan McDermott), a wholly naive voice of reason.

Time Stands Still offers a real feel for a journalist's sense that documenting the world is a way to eventually change it for the better, or at least to appropriate its mystery. Margulies' four characters make the various facets of those notions come alive - ideas that all four actors in this production run with.

Howard Shapiro gets scarred and talks with director Bruce Martin at www.philly.com/scarred

Time Stands Still

A coproduction of Act II Playhouse and Delaware Theatre Company, at Act II, 56 E. Butler Ave., Ambler, through March 11. Tickets: $27-$33. 215-654-0200 or www.act2playhouse.org.