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 42nd 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.
