Word: booed
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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...
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...
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...
...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...