Here's something ELSE I missed--damn!
(I'm so glad, though, that Roberta is being properly acknowleged!)
http://theater2.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/theater/reviews/14meta.htmlArt Is Sometimes Easy, but Life’s Another Story 
Julia Gibson in "The Shape of Metal."
By
CARYN JAMESPublished: September 14, 2007
Roberta Maxwell is so magnificent as an aged sculptor in “The Shape of Metal” that it’s easy to see why she would have been drawn to this ramshackle work by the respected Irish playwright
Thomas Kilroy. As Nell, she sits rooted in a chair at the start, in tattered clothes that make her look like a bag lady, except for the flourish of a brightly colored head scarf. Her body seems diminished, but her voice remains fierce as she goes into verbal battle with her angry daughter Judith (the equally powerful
Julia Gibson).
Judith begins to clear away the empty food containers cluttering the studio, dominated by Nell’s monumental stone sculpture of a woman’s head. And as she does, the women confront messy questions about the past and about Nell’s older daughter, Grace, who disappeared — who escaped or was driven away — when she was a young woman, more than 30 years before.
As the first act goes on, it flashes back those 30 years, and when Ms. Maxwell reappears as the energetic, middle-aged Nell you appreciate how subtly she conveyed the physical and emotional effects of aging without conspicuously acting old. Together she and Ms. Gibson are so potent that they move beyond the clumsy device of Grace (it doesn’t help that Molly Ward plays her so awkwardly, in dreams and flashbacks) and bring life to the unoriginal issues beneath all that anger. Nell is a great artist who is about to be given her own room at the Museum of Modern Art in Ireland. But she has been an emotional monster as a mother, ambitious and sexually free and selfish about what her freedom and ambition have cost her daughters.
Given the promise of Act I, it’s shocking that Act II falls apart so completely, with a resolution so perfunctory and predictable that you can almost see Mr. Kilroy dusting off his hands as if he can’t wait to be through. There are terrific contributions to the production, including Lex Liang’s set design, which gives credibility to the artist’s studio and a sense of space to the tiny stage.
Yet nothing, not even Ms. Maxwell’s extraordinary performance, can prevent the unsatisfying feeling that arrives at the end and undermines the entire experience.
“The Shape of Metal” continues through Sept. 30 at 59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street, Manhattan; (212) 753-5959
