Laura Linney plays Lucy, as she did twice already at the Bridge Theatre in London.

She tells us about the “ruthlessness” with which she’s gone on to pursue a writing career, but everything - sad brown wig, sad gray cardigan, sad blue voice - insist that she’s actually as vulnerable as a kitten in the rain. Her doctor touches her forehead, and Lucy says she wept with gratitude at his kindness. She tries to get her to talk about her father’s traumatic and traumatizing behavior, and she’s rebuffed. She tries to interest her mother in her life, and she fails. Yet her daughter is delighted to listen, since after a yearning, desperate, impoverished childhood, here is the intimacy that Lucy has always craved. Every woman who has tried to leave her small town, or fancied herself in love, or had any level of self-regard, has wound up alone, Lucy’s mother says. Despite Lucy’s obvious fragility, her mother is brusque and prickly, telling story after story about women from Amgash who have come to bad ends. Lucy’s mother has come to sit by her bedside for several days, braving New York and the estrangement that has risen up between them since Lucy left Amgash, Illinois, years ago. Lucy is in the hospital - or at least, she was in the hospital, and she is now telling the story of that time with a kind of wonder. (Books are conspiracies between the writer and the single reader.) Theater, on the other hand, even when there’s only one woman speaking, is existentially noisy: a great big shuffling, coughing, ruminating beast is watching, and it needs to be tamed. That particular sensation of private suspension and emotional reservation, though, requires true quiet. Strout’s book is brief you seem to read it in a single held breath. What then unfolds is a dull lesson in the difference between what’s needed on the page and on the stage. It has established its suppressed-tears tone, and it has assured us that there will be no writerly interventions (by adapter Rona Munro) nor staging choices (by Richard Eyre) to make the beautiful book Strout wrote into a functional theater text. Twenty minutes in, every card in its deck is already on the table. It doesn’t flop hard - with its limited ambition, it has no height from which to fall. And what do 40- muffled-sound-year-old women want? We want rueful stories about mothers and daughters! We want Elizabeth Strout novels! We want Laura Linney! Every Venn-diagram circle about a certain kind of woman - the sort that subscribes to nonprofit theaters, specifically - overlaps in this little sliver. Recent figures tell us that 68 percent of Broadway audiences are women.

Everything about programming the one-woman performance in Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Of all the questions flooding through a mutinous brain during My Name Is Lucy Barton, “How did we get here?” has the most obvious answer.

My name is lucy