In Time Stands Still, Sarah, a photojournalist, and James, a reporter, have spent the majority of their eight-year relationship dashing between war zones. After unforeseen circumstances hurtle them back home to Brooklyn, the couple uncovers the challenges of establishing a conventional life away from the chaos that brought them together. The idea to explore the complexities of a relationship against the backdrop of global strife came to Donald Margulies gradually, after he found his daily life interrupted frequently with news on the war in Iraq. “Reconciling my life of relative safety and comfort in Connecticut with the horror taking place across the globe bedeviled me,” he says. “I wanted to tackle moral problems of our day, and I wanted to set it not in the war itself but in the familiarity of the homefront.”
Though Sarah and James are embroiled in the high-stakes world of conflict zone reporting, the play focuses on the moral ambiguities of journalists who cover horrific events rather than advancing a particular political agenda. Away from the field for her first extended time, Sarah considers her perceived emotional detachment from the atrocities in the field—at what point has she stopped bearing witness and become complicit in the pain and trauma she photographs? This dilemma bleeds into her personal life, as Sarah and James contemplate their respective futures: Sarah can comfortably distance herself behind a camera from the chaos of war, but this detachment—real or perceived—has different consequences in the context of her relationship.
Time Stands Still captures the turning point in a relationship’s evolution, when a foundation of shared passions begins to crack under the weight of past wounds and diverging needs. Set in a global context but playing out on an intimate scale, Margulies’s nuanced work is a deft exploration of the compromises we must all make in love, war, and life.