In `Bette and Boo,' Everything's Relative

THE MARRIAGE OF BETTE AND BOO

By Christopher Durang

At Hasty Pudding Theater, Cambridge

Through Nov. 8

Sometimes the most precious moments are the times when we just don't know how to react--those isolated moments when we sit on a precipice between insane laughter and a flood of tears, not knowing how to respond rationally to an extraordinarily moving situation. This complicated mix of emotions is elicited by many milestones in the passing of a lifetime: falling in love, marriage, a new dead baby, A new dead baby? Well, yes, according to Christopher Durang. In his wacky, witty and surprisingly moving play, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, now playing at the Hasty Pudding Theater, the arrival of any baby, whether alive or dead is an excellent excuse for big tears as well as big laughs.

The Marriage of Bette and Boo is essentially a tweaked autobiography of the deeply troubled marriage of Durang's parents, and of the difficult years he had growing up in a less-than-perfect family. Along with a stream of stillborns, Durang drags onstage a number of horrifying events which would normally only be fodder for serious family dramas (including alcoholic fathers, sexist inlaws, overbearing mothers, bitter siblings, ruined holidays, ineffective counseling, desperate mothers and the death of aging parents), shows them in all their horrible glory, and manages to somehow leave the audience in stitches.

Durang doesn't merely display the horrible sides of his family for the sake of bitter comedy, however. The comedy of Bette and Boo is rather an obviously serious and sometimes clinical attempt to work through serious topics with large amounts of therapeutic laughter. The real majesty of Durang's technique is that in the middle of busting a communal gut, the audience simultaneously feels a profound need to cry. At the funniest moments, the audience cannot help but deeply sympathize with the profound desperation and despair of the characters.

The American Repertory Theater's (A.R.T.) production, under the direction of Marcus Stern, is keenly aware of the subtle emotional requirements of the play. All aspects of the production combine to give a startling and witty interpretation of Durang's wacky portrait of love, marriage and family. Before the actors enter, set designer Molly Hughes' interesting set foreshadows the wacky perspectives that are to come. A traditional, colonial style room resides on a stage that slants forward severely (making one wonder how the actors manage to avoid tumbling straight into the audience) with walls that slant together toward a distant focal point. It gives the impression that we are always looking at a photograph with skewed proportions, and illuminates very severely the sad fact that we are not watching picture-perfect families parade across the stage.

The actors, on the whole, are an extremely intelligent bunch who obviously understand the subtle emotional levels of the characters. The characters are for the most part men and women attempting desperately to fit themselves into acceptable family roles and stereotypes (the alcoholic father, the oppressed and dreamy mother, the shy, confused son, etc.), and the American Repertory Theatre players do a fine job of establishing both the stereotype and the substance of every character.

Caroline Hall and Randall Jaynes, playing the title characters Bette and Boo, make a convincingly disfunctional couple. Hall in particular shines as the wistful Bette, a woman whose surface seems trite but who claims a deeply troubled and romantic interior. Perhaps the most touching scene in the play is a monologue Bette delivers on the phone to an old girlfriend she has lost touch with. For the first time in the production, Bette sheds her exterior flakiness and openly reveals the profoundly disappointed young woman she has become. Hall excellently maneuvers between Bette's exterior stupidity and interior complexity, consistently managing to win our sympathy and break our hearts as Bette's family tragedies accumulate. Jayne's Boo is the only slightly disappointing character in the play. Although he plays a convincing drunk, Jaynes doesn't quite match the vibrancy of the other actors--delivering his lines in a strange and apathetic monotone, Jaynes often falls flat and unconvincing in the midst of the wild excitement exuding from everyone else on stage.

Matt Chiorini as Matt (Bette and Boo's Ivy League son) and Sophia Fox-Long as Emily (Bette's extremely Catholic and self-conscious younger sister) are both finally given the well-deserved chance to shine after multiple chorus roles in previous A.R.T. productions. Chiorini gives Matt just the right amount of nervous intellectualism, endearing earnesty and Oedipal anxiety, and Fox-Long utilizes multiple effective tactics to move her character back and forth between pouting brat, self-conscious bookworm and self-sacrificial saint.

More than a play about marriage, however, The Marriage of Bette and Boo is a play about parents and, more specifically, about in-laws. The differences between Bette and Boo's parents and their very different senses of familial responsibility provide Durang with endless amounts of comic fuel. Karen MacDonald (playing Margaret Brennan, Bette's mother) stomps across the stage as a wildly exaggerated version of an over-domineering mother in complete denial that anything is wrong with her family; Thomas Derrah mumbles his way convincingly through Margaret's stroke-victim husband Paul's virtually incomprehensible speeches. In contrast to Margaret Brennan's fruitless and overeager attempts to raise a normal family, Boo's parents, Karl and Soot, are the archetypal alcoholic husband and seriously oppressed sex-toy wife. Will Lebow, playing Boo's father, spurts a stream of obscene jokes, sexist comments and alcohol-induced insults, deftly making you want to strangle him; and Paula Plum, playing Boo's mother, giggles her way adeptly into our sympathies as Soot descends further and further into flamboyant madness.

The fantastic nature of all of these characters can't in the end, do much to muffle the fact that everything families normally cling to for common happiness is steadily and completely destroyed for everyone in Bette and Boo's extended family: Thanksgiving is ruined in a mess of spilled gravy and arguments, nobody can remember why anyone celebrates Christmas, birthdays always end in somebody dying, horny priests make religion unreliable and children don't, in the end, ever respect their parents (and for good cause).

No wonder Matt screams towards the end of the play, "I can't make sense of these things anymore!" Caught in a constant mess of conflict and hypocrisy, nobody in this play ever really makes any understandable sense to each other or even to the audience. The folks at the A.R.T. wisely choose to leave the enigmas and misunderstandings in the play wide open to interpretation, presenting the characters as they are--faulty, hypocritical and always amusing. In the end, what makes the most sense about The Marriage of Bette and Boo, what makes the play so intensely human and what we all leave the theater understanding, is that sometimes people really have no choice but to misunderstand.