Theater Review: Roundabout Ends 2016-17 Season With Two Gems

With the last weekend in August, the 2016-17 season ended for New York’s Roundabout Theater Co. The final two productions I saw were relatively small-scale comedy-dramas that mined the individual playwrights’ family history to unearth often searing truths about love and the obligations that people bear to those closest to them. 

The better-known quantity among the two was the dramedy Marvin's Room, staged a quarter century ago but not getting its Broadway premiere till now. (An all-star 1996 film adaptation starred Robert DeNiro, Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Leonardo DiCaprio, Gwen Verdon and Hume Cronyn.)

The plot centers on Bessie (played in this production by Lili Taylor), a middle-aged woman who has sacrificed much of her life to look after her ailing father Marvin and her soap opera-addicted Aunt Ruth. As depressing and physically draining as that job can be, however, it is about to get worse: she is told by her doctor that she herself has leukemia. Now, who will care for the caregiver?

The answer, at least at first glance, would be her sister Lee (played by Janeane Garofalo). But the sisters have maintained an uneasy peace by having as little as possible to do with each other for the last two decades. Despite her willingness to help, Lee’s blunt, in-your-face style is no more acceptable to Bessie now than it was before they became estranged. And Lee, a divorced single mom, brings an additional metaphorical time bomb to the relationship: her son Hank, seemingly unable to get out of his mental-health institution because of repetitive anger-management issues.

  

Playwright Scott McPherson evinced a deep understanding of these characters that could only have come from long acquaintance with their real-life originals. The principal characters, he admitted at the time of the play’s original Off-Broadway production in 1991, were based on family members. The actions, language and lessons he absorbed in watching the physical decline of relatives and the stresses of their caregivers were reinforced as an adult, as the gay community came face to face with AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s. (McPherson himself died of complications from the disease in 1992 at age 33.)

Director Anne Kauffman deftly used the American Airlines Theatre, the company’s larger venue on 42^nd Street, maximizing its capabilities for the several scene changes called for. More important, she got her cast members to tread delicately on the border between drama and comedy by having them adhere to both the hard outlines and the abundant contradictions of their characters.

Taylor subtly set out the dilemma of a caregiver who veers from self-denial to denying her grave medical condition. Given her background as a comedienne, Garofalo performed as expected—hilariously—with the brassy parts of her character, but she also brought unanticipated poignancy to the moments when the weight of past decisions fall all too heavily on her. Jack DiFalco and Luca Padovan also acquitted themselves admirably as Hank and his confused younger brother Charlie.

In this sensitive, compassionate but often witty treatment, the Roundabout vividly demonstrated why McPherson’s early death represented a real loss to modern theater. With luck, the high visibility of this production will encourage smaller regional theaters to stage this more often, too.

Napoli, Brooklyn is another in a series of new plays by promising younger playwrights given a showcase in the intimate Laura Pels Theatre, including Lynn Nottage, Joshua Harmon and Stephen Karam. Another young playwright, Meghan Kennedy, who had a prior play, Too Much, Too Much, Too Many staged by the Roundabout Underground, returned with a deeply personal play set in a pre-gentrified Park Slope in the throes of change.

Like Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, Napoli, Brooklyn spotlights a family in a particular place and time, particularly one child’s chafing at a parent’s tight strictures. Unlike Williams’ “memory play,” though, this play does not take the vantage point of a direct eyewitness, but was instead inspired by the playwright’s own mother, who was a teen struggling with her sexuality at the time of the play (1960).

The plot focused on the coming-of-age of the three Muscolino sisters in a household dominated by their unhappy, abusive father Nic. Morose Tina, a factory worker, struggles with guilt over her failure to shield kid sister Francesca from Nic’s rage when Francesca gives herself an androgynous haircut. A third sister, Vita, intervenes and is terribly injured, forcing her into a convent, where she argues with God when she is not acting sassy toward the nuns. The girls’ mother, Luda, pleased but unsettled by the attention shown by a gentle Irish widower, the neighborhood butcher Albert Duffy, keeps hoping for a miracle: Nic’s return to the thoughtful, ardent man who wooed her decades ago.

Out of the blue, before the show’s intermission, a miracle seems to arrive, in the form of a disaster that really occurred in Park Slope in 1960. Nic, astonished at his survival in an accident, seemingly changes overnight. Luda rejoices at the transformation, but her daughters are more suspicious. That sets things up for a second disaster: a Christmas feast that, with so many different people with unexpressed feelings all gathered together, promises to be combustible. 

Director Gordon Edelstein helped move the plot along briskly—and, with the help of sound designer Fitz Patton, lighting designer Ben Stanton, and set designer Eugene Lee, provided one of the most unexpected and terrifying theatrical convulsions I can ever remember seeing. But best of all, he extracted rich, deeply felt performances across the board from his case.   

Alyssa Bresnahan created an unusually vibrant earth mother in Luda. Elise Kibler (who shone in a markedly different role as an English secretary in the Mint Theatre’s production of John Van Druten’s London Wall) made a funny, fiery Vita. Shirine Babblent lent a quiet dignity to her role as Celia Jones, an African-American co-worker who befriends Tina. Two actors were especially noteworthy in tricky roles: Juliet Brett as Mr. Duffy’s daughter Connie, whose growing romantic feelings for Francesca leave her with ravaging guilt, and Lev Gorn, who finds the complexity and disappointment in a violent figure who could have been rendered simply as a monster.

In Napoli, Brooklyn, Kennedy displayed a sure grasp of the tight bonds in urban neighborhoods peopled by immigrants. Those bonds might have been confining, even leaving marks on recipients that were slow to disappear. But now that so many of those ties are attenuated, the playwright showed her love could also exist there, as zesty and richly abundant as the food that Luda prepares for her family for the Feast of the Seven Fishes.