Word: marvinism
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...