Simon reviews Pollock's play, finding the work well-crafted and thought-provoking yet a less than diverting evening of theatre.

Sharon Pollock's Blood Relations is ... quite routinely boring. Lizzie Borden may not be the most original subject for the stage (Elsie Borden might have been more interesting), but a woman who, as Miss Pollock plainly suggests, could ax her father and stepmother to death in 1893, and even in those pre-Alan Dershovitz days, get herself acquitted, is not likely, you would think, to yield an infinitely talky, monotonous, and in most ways unsurprising play. It is this most successful Canadian playwright's notion, however, that Lizzie was a lesbian feminist as well as a free and cultured spirit stifling in the burg of Fall River. When her father kept signing over more and more of her rightful inheritance to his crude wife and her cruder brother, and would not listen to...