Humor in Death and Dying

Marvin's Room

by Scott McPherson

directed by David Petrarca

at the Hasty Pudding Theater

through November 29

"It was my grandmother who was "dying," her cancer-ridden body resting in the upstairs bedroom where the only television in the house stood at the foot of her bed. If you wanted to watch Ed Sullivan, and I did, you also had to watch grandmother, commercials and morphine injections coming at regular intervals. It was a situation that, to a child, seemed neither odd nor morbid," notes playwright Scott McPherson in the program for Marvin's Room. The bluntness in McPherson's art may well be that of a child but it is also one of a brilliant craftsman.

Marvin's Room has all the makings for an odd and morbid play. Bessie, who takes care of her bedridden father Marvin and her disabled Aunt Ruth, finds out she herself is seriously ill. She reluctantly accepts the help of her long-estranged sister Lee and her two "problem" children, an older boy currently in a mental institution, and a younger one who would rather read 24 hours a day than deal with the people around him.

But the play is decidedly unmorbid and, for all its eccentric characters, overwhelmingly familiar. Marvin's Room is only peripherally about death itself--Marvin himself, the character closest to death, is hidden behind a translucent wall which, both literally and metaphorically, allows us vague perceptions but no clear penetrations. Rather, the play is about the ways in which death changes the live of the living. Thinking about dying forces a reevalution of life, relationship and future. In that process, each character confronts their own trepidation with resources they never knew they had.

Humor is the most important of these resources. Lee responds to a mention of her son's stay in a mental institution: "We don't like to call it the mental institution, we call it the loony bin or the nuthouse to show we have a sense of humor about it." Lee undercuts our inclination to pity a homeless woman who has to take her two children to live in a church: "On Sundays," she tells us, "the nuns roll out a sheet of dough and, with a shot glass, they cut out those--you know, what do you call it--body of Christ things."

Lee vies with Aunt Ruth for the funniest lines in the show. Ruth, who rejoices in the marriage of her favorite soap opera characters, is asked by Bessie, "isn't that the same guy who raped [a woman] at one point?" Ruth responds quickly, "that was months ago, he's really a nice boy."

This is a cast so remarkable that it's hard to imagine these characters played any other way. The performances exemplify abiding commitment to character--the principals come to Boston from either the Kennedy Center or New York staging of Marvin's Room. Carol Schultz plays a deeply complex Bessie. At once, timid and furiously caustic, forgiving and petty, she views her illness with both resignation and resistance. Tim Monison as Dr. Wally is a gleefully bumbling doctor straight out of vaudeville. Nance Williamson as Lee is a perfectly caffeinated, bleached blonde graduate from cosmetology school. Mary Diveny's Ruth, unfocused, distracted, nearly helpless, is compassionately endearing. Mark Rosenthal's sincerity renders eloquent even the rather generic words of the rebellious teenager Hank: "people start thinking of you a certain way--and pretty soon you're there."

Director David Petrarca is meticulously attentive to the strengths of both the text and the actors. The scene between Bessie and Hank on a warm Florida night and the one between Hank, his mother, and his psychiatrist at the mental institution, are beautifully staged. Petrarca directed the world premiere of Marvin's Room in 1991 at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, where he is currently resident director, and then continued with the show to the Hartford Stage Company, Playwrights Horizons, off-Broadway at the Minetta Lane Theatre, and at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.

Petrarca has insisted in past interviews that to call this a play about AIDS is to narrow its scope, and to ignore McPherson's original intentions in 1990. But to think of this play as not about AIDS is also to narrow its scope and to ignore McPherson's current sensibilities. McPherson wrote in the note for the program in 1991: "Now I am 31 and my lover has AIDS. Our friends have AIDS. And we all take care of each other, the less sick caring for the more sick. At times an unbelievably harsh fate is transcended by a simple act of love, by caring for one another."

The 33-year-old McPherson has often been facetious about considering himself a playwright. Whatever he names himself, there are not many writing on this scale: Marvin's Room received the 1992 Drama Desk Award for Best Play, two Outer Critics Circle Awards, the John Gassner Playwrighting award, the Whiting Writer's Award, and the Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award.

The Boston production is the first that McPherson has been too sick to participate in. His comissioned work is currently on hold. With Marvin's Room, McPherson has transcended an unbelievably harsh fate.