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Six women and a baby

April 15, 2016 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I report from Chicago on the premiere of Tracy Letts’ new play, Mary Page Marlowe. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Tracy Letts is a poet of the ordinary, a playwright who writes about commonplace lives in uncommon ways. Take “Mary Page Marlowe,” his latest play, in which he tells the story of an accountant from Ohio whose life, while occasionally bumpy, seems at bottom to be as conventional as a loaf of store-bought white bread. Yet she claims on her deathbed to have led “a good life,” and whether or not you agree with her, you’ll be enthralled to watch that life unfold, for it is described in a manner so clear and true that you cannot doubt its significance.

112973Handsomely mounted by Steppenwolf Theatre Company and staged by Anna D. Shapiro with great delicacy, “Mary Page Marlowe,” which runs for a bit less than 90 intermission-free minutes, consists of a series of loosely linked vignettes that follow the title character from childhood to old age—we see her as a baby and at the ages of 12, 19, 27, 36, 40, 44, 50, 59, 63 and 69—and are performed out of chronological order. In addition, Mr. Letts has left yawning gaps between the 11 scenes, meaning that while it isn’t hard to follow what’s going on at any given moment, you must pay close attention to make the various events in Mary Page’s life add up to a meaningful whole….

On paper, it may not sound as though “Mary Page Marlowe” is worth the trouble. Born in 1945, Mary Page marries three times and has two children (Jack Edwards and Madeline Weinstein), one of whom she outlives. We see her gossiping with her college roommates (Tess Frazer and Ariana Venturi), sleeping with her boss (Gary Wilmes), talking to her therapist (Kirsten Fitzgerald), telling her children that she is getting a divorce, watching TV with her third husband (Alan Wilder) and learning from a nurse (Sandra Marquez) that she will soon die. The only surprise comes in the scene in which she informs her second husband (Ian Barford) that she’s going to have to spend at least two years in prison for drunken driving. Otherwise, Mary Page never goes anywhere interesting or does anything unusual.

So why bother with her? Because Mr. Letts does much the same thing in “Mary Page Marlowe” that Thornton Wilder had in mind when he described “Our Town,” his celebrated chronicle of life in a small New England village, as “an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.” Inspired by the death of his mother a year and a half ago, he has sought to plumb the complexities of an “average” life, one in which a person’s identity changes from decade to decade, very often in ways that seem arbitrary beyond belief. “Someone else could have written my diary,” Mary Page tells her therapist. “I’m not the person I am. I’m just acting like a person who is a wife and a mother.” Who, then, is she—and how ought she to live? That so ordinary a woman should be grappling with such profound questions may not be the stuff of high drama, but in Mr. Letts’ hands it proves to be the stuff of a deeply affecting night at the theater….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Tracy Letts and Carrie Coon talk about Mary Page Marlowe on PBS NewsHour:

Replay: the Everly Brothers in 1957

April 15, 2016 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAThe Everly Brothers sing “Wake Up, Little Susie” and “Bye Bye Love” on The Perry Como Show, accompanied by Mitchell Ayers and His Orchestra. This episode was originally telecast on NBC on December 7, 1957:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

Almanac: Thomas Mann on profundity

April 15, 2016 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Profundity must smile.”

Thomas Mann, Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, ran earlier this season at New Orleans’ Le Petit Theatre. It previously closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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