Word: mcpherson
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MARVIN'S ROOM. The first generation of AIDS plays dealt with the disease head on and focused on a specifically gay male world. The new wave, like Prelude to a Kiss and this off-Broadway knockout by Scott McPherson, respond metaphorically, never mentioning gays or even the disease but instead looking at the universal experiences of illness and dying, family rage and reconciliation. Director David Petrarca has polished the work through stagings in Chicago and Hartford, and it shines -- especially in Laura Esterman's portrayal of a care-giving aunt and Mark Rosenthal's depiction of her turbulent teenage nephew...
MARVIN'S ROOM by Scott McPherson...
That poignant exchange is at the moral heart of Marvin's Room, an unflinching yet surprisingly funny play about illness, physical and mental, that opened off-Broadway this month after runs in Chicago and Hartford. Playwright Scott McPherson, 32, has an original voice, balanced between sentiment and surrealism, and a gift for creating characters who are more than the sum of their behavior. He also has AIDS, which gives him premature sensitivity about the importance of help and healing but imperils his talent just as it is emerging...
...down his neighborhood, the other a bespectacled Milquetoast who perpetually retreats into a book. She also has a wonderful speech recalling her only romantic love, a carnival worker who drowned before her eyes when a partying crowd onshore mistook his desperate pleas for habitual clowning. Amid the grim reality, McPherson's characters take childlike delight in simple things and maintain a giggly sense of humor. Bessie's father Marvin, unseen but for his shadow through a glass-brick wall, has been dying for two decades -- "real slow," Bessie explains with a hint of asperity, "so I don't miss anything...
...with the N.B.A.'s Atlanta Hawks. "But some of them are willing to call every hotel in town. When night falls, they move in. You see some of the same faces from town to town. They're like card collectors." And they are seldom shy about intentions. Recalls Miles McPherson, a former pro-football defensive back turned preacher: "When we went to clubs, women would be competing in any way to get to us, and it is very easy to take advantage of that situation. Some said they wanted an autograph, and then they'd ask you to sign their...