Review: 'The Performance,' by Claire Thomas

By Claire Thomas. (Riverhead Books, 240 pages, $26.)

With live theater beginning to return, the opening pages of this ingenious novel play like a reminder of crowd etiquette. It opens with Margot, a professor with a troubled home life, making her way to her spot in the middle of a row, navigating past already seated theatergoers while trying not to step on toes or butt-touch anyone, before she settles in to discover her neighbor already has decided the armrest is his.

Full of perfectly observed details, that vignette will ring true to anyone who loves going to the theater. It also shows how author Claire Thomas works, with tiny bits of behavior that form portraits of three women who all happen to be attending the same performance of Samuel Beckett's "Happy Days" at an Australian regional theater.

There's a bit of "Mrs. Dalloway" in Thomas' three streams of consciousness, and you may wish the theatergoers would pay more attention to what's happening onstage, but our glimpses into the women's thoughts are a sharp way to illustrate how, based on our unique histories and views, each person who sees a play experiences a very different version of it.