BETWEEN EAST AND WEST portrays a middle-aged Czech émigré couple struggling to adapt to a new country.
"The title of Richard Nelson's unsettling new play is deliberately misleading. East-West politics do, however, provide the backdrop and premise of the play: It concerns the experience of a Czech couple forced for political reasons to emigrate to New York. The problems they face in exile, Nelson suggests, have as much to do with the residual gap between America and Europe as with that between East and West. But the focus is on the conflict between Gregor and Erna, the two exiles, themselves. In his careful study of their relationship, Nelson reminds us that power and freedom cannot be understood in purely political terms." Sally Laird, Times Literary Supplement
"Its subject is homesickness: that love which cannot bear to speak its name because it's more private than any other emotion. The setting is a one-room flat in New York, but the real setting is the no-man's land between the home they lost and the one they'll never really find... I liked this painful, moving, compassionate play; I liked the way it stated its point obliquely, but with a hard, unsentimental edge. I liked its wise humor, and its shrewd sense of what it's like to be middle-aged, uprooted, resentful, determined, and difficult." John Peter, London Sunday Times