Marvin's Room

This revival of Marvin's Room may leave you wondering why people revive plays at all - especially when there have been a very successful movie (Leonardo DiCaprio) and had well received original off-Broadway and regional productions.  It would seem that you either have to do as well as the previous two or take your toys from the sandbox and just go home.  This revival is unfortunately the latter case.

Don't get me wrong - Lili Taylor (Bessie) and Janeane Garofalo (Lee) and Celia Weston (Ruth) form a magnificent trio of family lost and floundering with life at large.  But in their efforts - they are flat.  Completely flat.  Other than a few laughs and a few serious moments - I never even felt these 3 women were family.  Neighbors maybe, but family no.  Bring in young Hank (Jack DiFalco) and Charlie (Luca Padovan) and it seems like they all just met at the day care.  No connections whatsoever.

The set is lackluster at best - not a typical Roundabout production at all.  Like everything about this revival - lackluster and bare.  It seems the trend these days - strip away the costumes, the set, the makeup and glamor and lay bare the script for all.  Well, it hasn't always worked in the past, and employing the gimmick this time hasn't either.

It's a touching play (Scott McPherson) but this incarnation left me feeling empty and un-touched. I wanted the subject to move me but a juggernaut this time around this play is not.

A Life

A powerful, humbling new play, A Life,  by Adam Bock is now playing over at Playwrights Horizons.  Mr. Bock explores life through a lonely, gay, introverted, quirky, and obsessive character, Nate Martin (David Hyde Pierce).  Not only does he explore his literal life, he explores the fleeting nature of life through his death.

Nate Martin is a complicated man yet at the same time, he's every man.  Frustrations, disappointments, plans, hopes, loves, dreams fill his life.  In the blink of an eye, things could change - and do.  About half of the play is spent watching Nate's body prepared for a funeral.  Life goes on around him, we hear his thoughts, and realize that it is all fleeting.

Nate is into astrology - the stars and planets and what they say about you and how they might explain your life.  To be honest, I'm not sure if that theme was meant to represent religion and its role in the human experience or possibly something more specific to Nate's belief system.  I do know there were no planetary realignments when he died so perhaps it just represents something that in the end, like everything else, is meaningless.

A touching, honest, and sad first scene; A shocking next turn of events with a dash of today's culture of inappropriateness thrown in just to make you shrug your shoulders; and a touching and brutally honest eulogy seen at the funeral capped most specifically by the thoughts from his mostly estranged sister (he was gay and from Minnesota and her comments were dripping with mid-western values and a complete lack of understanding, disappointment, and ultimately and ironically the same loneliness).

There's a funeral joke told by his best friend Curtis (Brad Heberlee) that you can't help but laugh at and at the same time makes you cringe.  Perfectly placed and such great acting around the uncomfortable nature of the whole affair.