Word: petrarca
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Wild's still omnipotent fingers transform the instrument into a source of marvels. He can electrify audiences with an impossibly demonic performance of Liszt's Mephisto Waltz, move them with an achingly tender account of a Sonetto del Petrarca by the composer or do both with the Manichean Sonata in B Minor...
directed by David Petrarca...
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...
...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...
Director David Petrarca, who has staged the show in each of its venues, handles the shifts in tones with equal measures of delicacy and boldness. Laura Esterman, who has played Bessie since the beginning, nonetheless has an aura of uncalculated spontaneity in the hardest sort of role, a character of true goodness who is still approachable and fun. Mark Rosenthal and Karl Maschek as the boys, also cast since Chicago, have been ably joined by Lisa Emery as their mother and Alice Drummond as their dotty great-aunt...