In the past couple months, I’ve
seen two plays at the Second Stage Theater Company: Mary Page Marlowe and
Straight White Men. Both were
interesting, by and large well-acted, yet neither fully succeeded, for
different reasons.
In Mary Page Marlowe, deep character
development with no end but death was made more interesting by having multiple
actors playing the eponymous woman at various ages — and not in chronological
order. By and by we saw her life, one
scene after another adding to our understanding, just not in order so that,
perhaps, we could understand her better than people who knew her all her
life — in order. And since it’s so very well done,
it almost worked.
Straight White Men,
however, is flawed. Again, interesting character relationships, but to no resolution. Is this why the playwright/director/producer decided
to blame it on the audience during the pre-show by blasting electronic percussion
at an offensively high decibel level, then making a theatre curtain out of a
glitter ball to flash strobe lights at the audience? At least last year’s exceedingly unpleasant production
of 1984 forewarned the audience that
there’d be migraine-inducing effects.
But the audience of Straight White
Men was assured that they were being abused to make a point: That some LBGTW+, as explained by two
pointless characters, often felt as uncomfortable as the audience did just by
being in non-LGBTW+ society. The relief at
the end of that 30-odd minutes was so great we were bound to be glad of the
play, right? Talk about hitting the
audience over the head with a baseball bat to send a message. Which, by the
way, does not appear to be the point of the play at all.
Mary
Page Marlowe by Tracy Letts, directed by Lila Neugebauer. Hereafter “MPM.”
MPM was largely about one woman’s
life of not dealing with her alcohol and sex addictions. We first meet her as her first marriage is
coming apart. It takes a while, with
this not chronological play, to learn something about why. When we meet her mother (passionately
brittle work by Grace Gummer) and father
(sympathetically portrayed by Nick Dillenburg), we feel the gap between these young
marrieds just after WWII. When we meet the
mother again distancing herself from her 12-year-old daughter with alcohol and
a sharp tongue, we see the beginning of Mary’s rugged road.
Mary is played by six excellent
actors:
·
Mia
Sinclair Jenness at the age of 12
·
Emma Geer
at the age of 19
·
Tatiana
Maslany at the ages of 27 and 36
·
Susan
Pourfar in her 40s
·
Kellie
Overbey at 50
·
And Blair
Brown in her 60s-70s.
Geer and Brown were the only
Marys who got to smile. The 19-year-old (Ms.
Geer) in hope of a different life from that of her mother, and Ms. Brown at
having made it through to sobriety and her third and favorite husband, Andy,
sweetly played by Brian Kerwin.
·
Tatiana
Maslany is so good that her lack of theatrical experience was
negligible. Already broken, her Mary is
tough, aloof, and protective.
· Susan
Pourfar is a New York actor I have followed for some time, from a far off Broadway
production of Turn of the Screw, to Tribes and most recently Mary Jane at New York Theatre Workshop. She never disappoints. Here her Intensity
disguises her pain and perplexity.
·
The harshest scene in the play and probably in
Mary Page Marlowe’s life, was the aftermath of a particularly dreadful time when
Mary hit rock bottom, presumably precipitating the end of her second marriage. Kellie
Overbey is devastating, first in her quiet acceptance of her guilt and just
deserts, and finally in her fury. Her
husband, very well played by David Aaron
Baker, cannot deal with this Mary and his floundering marriage.
·
Blair
Brown’s Mary, having survived her life and three marriages, is the only
Mary with a real smile.
·
Kayli
Carter is excellent as MPM’s daughter Wendy, a put-upon (and she really
is!) teenager and a concerned young adult losing patience with her alcoholic
mother.
All in all, MPM offers good
direction, good acting, good design, and a just slightly off script by the
always interesting Mr. Letts.
Straight
White Men by Young Jean Lee, directed by Anna
D. Shapiro. Hereafter “SWM.”
The Premise: The father, Ed,
has his grown boys over for the Christmas holidays, harking back to the days of
the boys’ youth, while their mother was still alive.
Entertaining as SWM sometimes
was, with some very nice ensemble work and an excellent scenic design by Todd Rosenthal, it didn’t seem to know
where it was going. Witness the pre-show,
which we were told was part of the play.
The Players:
·
Armie
Hammer is the youngest brother, Drew.
He is tall and handsome and OK, but this actor’s lack of theatrical
experience shows. Without an editor to
cut away, Mr. Hammer did not flow from one scene to the next, even though the
play, unlike Mary Page Marlowe, was
in chronological order. Not that he made
mistakes, or if he did I was unaware. Unfortunately,
he was not alive on stage.
·
Josh Charles
is excellent as middle brother Jake, unctuous to cruel, living in the moment as
well as in the past, frequently “fighting” with his younger brother Drew.
·
Paul
Schneider as the eldest brother Matt was quietly full of surprises and
quite marvelous. I am not familiar with this subtle actor’s work but will be
paying attention in future.
·
Stephen
Payne as Ed, the father, seemed a little uncertain of his lines early on
(as the third actor to play this role in rehearsal and previews), but
strengthened as the evening wore on. Mind you, his final scene was quite
unbelievable, but that’s the fault of the writer, not the actor.
Matt is presently underemployed
and living with the father, who is happy to have his company. While the others leave their messes behind, Matt
cleans up after everyone. He says more
than once, “I just want to be helpful.”
That he does a great deal of work to make everyone else comfortable,
things his mother would have been doing had she been alive, was barely noticed
and not meaningful to his brothers or even his father. This of course is insulting to the boys’
mother, and all mothers. Matt’s brothers
wonder why, with his brains and college degrees, he’s not doing more with his
life. They don’t get him at all. He is not behaving like their notion of a privileged
straight white male.
Strong relationships of a
lifetime between the brothers are powerful and hilarious. If one says something unforgivable and others leave
the room, somehow they come back to dance it off in delightful choreography by Faye Driscoll. After all, family is family and it seems
they’ll always get along in the end.
Until they don’t and the ‘different’ one, with unaccustomed ideas and
conclusions, is left out in the cold. These
three sons have no resemblance to “My Three Sons” of 1960s television.
By the end it seemed to me that
the play had moved on to gender issues. Matt
started being what he considered truly useful when the mother died, and he took
care of the youngest brother the way the mother would have — talked him down
from hysteria, encouraged him to take a shower (you’ll feel better) and then to
have a sandwich (ditto). Throughout Matt
played the mother’s role of feeding the men and cleaning up after them. Her loss, which clearly affected each man, made
Matt step into her place. And none of
the other men in the family had any respect for what he was doing — to them
Matt had become a loser if he lacked ambition and didn’t use his intelligence
and training to do something “bigger.”
Since that was the most
interesting thing to come out of the play, I do not understand why the writer
and director decided to disguise this by implying in the obnoxious pre-show
that the play was about LGBTQ+ issues and punishing the (largely white) audience
with overly loud electronic muzak and glaring strobe lights.
Theatre and politics go together,
but this pairing ended in a nasty divorce.
Note regarding a truly annoying and unfair trend in Playbills: In the (not so distant) past, the cast list
was in order of the actors’ appearances, making it easier for the audience to
figure out who played what if they didn’t already recognize the players. Lately the listing has been alphabetical by
the performer’s last name, which means that if you didn’t already know the
actor’s name, you won’t learn it from the program. For instance, in MPM, there are six men in the
cast. One male character had a full name
listed, so was easily identifiable as the father of the main character. All other male character names showed just a
first name, so if you missed a mention from the stage in each man’s sole
appearance, you were out of luck. I
recognized Brian Kerwin as MPM’s third husband, therefore spotted him
in the program as “Andy.” For the first
two I have no clue, and there were three non-husband male characters. If we’re not identifying characters by
“married lover” or “guy at the dry cleaners” in the character list, how can we
know the actor name? Until Playbill goes
back to listing characters in order of their appearance so we can figure out those actors we
don’t already recognize, I will continue to complain about this to all and
sundry.
It’s been a while since Molly
spoke her mind. I will try to catch up
this summer, as I did last summer, and fill you in on theatre-going not
mentioned since April (!) of this year.
~ Molly Matera, signing off to search for
scraps of paper on which she scribbled her thoughts about other plays….