Marvin's Room
July 22 - August 7, 2011

Dramaturgy by Ross Harmon
Cast | About the play | What the Critics Said | An Interview With The Author, Scott McPherson | The Author's Death Notice | A Critic's Follow-up | The Movie

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MARVIN'S ROOM: ABOUT THE PLAY...

"Marvin's Room," a play by written by Scott McPherson had its premiere in Chicago in 1990 and went on to national acclaim, including off-Broadway runs in New York and at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. The play won the 1992 Outer Critics Circle award for best play, the 1992 Drama Desk award for best play and the Joseph Jefferson award in Chicago for best original work.

MARVIN'S ROOM: WHAT THE CRITICS SAID...

"... written with a blazing, tender accuracy that grips you with the force of revelation..." © The Village Voice

"... the themes of death, love, duty, care, and service are frugally entwined in a play of considerable emotional resonance. Laughing one minute, we are shuddering with a stealthy empathy the next. Death has rarely seemed more interesting, or love so complex..."

© The New York Post

"... one of the funniest plays of the year, as well as one of the wisest and most moving. When the American theatre gains a new voice this original, this unexpected, you really must hear it for yourself. What separates "Marvin's Room" from so many synthetic American plays...is that even at it's occasional sunniest, it never lies or sentimentalizes the truth. Mr. McPherson does not pretend that people always die with dignity, either, or that everyone isn't dying. Instead he asks, what good could we do with the time, however much or little it is, that we have left before our inevitable harsh fate arrives? My first impulse after seeing Mr. McPherson's play was to gather those I care about close to me, and take them into ‘Marvin's Room,’ so that they too, could bask in its bouncing, healing light."

© The New York Times

AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR, SCOTT MCPHERSON...

THEATER: At the Hartford CT Stage, "Marvin's Room"
By Alvin Klein, The New York Times
© November 18, 1990

Ask Scott McPherson why people laugh during his play "Marvin's Room," which concerns illness - lingering and terminal, physical and mental - as well as such incidental details as drowning, child abuse, arson and overall desperation, and he briskly answers, "Why not?"

In all seriousness, the first scene of "Marvin's Room," which opened at Hartford Stage Company on Friday and is to run through Dec. 15, is meant to be funny, he said. "It tells people it's O.K. to laugh," Mr. McPherson said before a recent rehearsal.

Conceived as a vaudeville-style doctor's sketch, the scene involves the fumbling, absent-minded Dr. Wally and his selfless patient, Bessie, who has come in for a checkup. She has devoted herself to the care of her father who has been dying for 20 years, the victim of a stroke and of cancer. He is the mysterious Marvin who "collects diseases as a hobby," the playwright said, and who remains a shadow throughout the play - bedridden behind a wall of 1,624 glass bricks.

After the comical visit to the inept physician, Bessie learns that she has leukemia. The play's other characters, who have been described as quirky, eccentric and loony, include the paralyzed Ruth, Bessie's aunt, and Lee, her estranged, hard-hearted sister. Ruth has three collapsed vertebrae and wears an electronic anesthetizer that is implanted in her brain. When she turns the dial, her pain is alleviated - and the garage door goes up. Lee has two teen-age sons, one of whom was confined to a mental institution after he burned down the family house.

To those accustomed to standard "disease of the week" television movies, "Marvin's Room" may well sound like a "diseases for all seasons" play. But it had a well-received premiere last February at the Goodman Theater Studio in Chicago, where such major works as "Hurlyburly," by David Rabe, and "Glengarry Glen Ross," by David Mamet, were first seen.

David Petrarca, the 28-year-old resident director of the Goodman Theater, staged Mr. McPherson's play, which has been praised by Chicago theater critics as a "deeply moving drama about dying and a very funny comedy about life."

On the play's shifting styles, the director commented: "Those changes are abrupt. The play can turn on a dime, from farce to realistic, brutal honesty, and one can undercut the other, but Scott always grounds it. It takes a while to commit to both - the bizarre and the poignant - and to find just the tone. Once it gets in its groove, it goes along on its own volition and doesn't fall off the track.

"It has to be recognizable. Everyone will find a family member on that stage and relate to the need to care for an aging parent or the fear of illness and the anxiety produced by that."

The 31-year-old Mr. McPherson, a former actor who has written one previous play, " 'Til the Fat Lady Sings," and is currently working on the screenplay for "Marvin's Room," which has been sold to Paramount Pictures, recalled the play's genesis:

"I was in a nice, warm Christmas play in Chicago three or four years ago, and I remembered how my Christmases were never like that when I was a kid. My family would go to St. Petersburg, Fla., to visit old, sick relatives I have fragmented memories of. I thought of Christmastime - the forced mood of the season and the reality of the situation. I don't think that's really the way it happened, but it sounds good."

"I thought of getting that into a play, and at the same time, I was working on a one-act play about an AIDS testing clinic, and somehow the two got fused. Although AIDS does not figure into 'Marvin's Room,' it covers the same emotional terrain. But I found I could not maintain a singular tone. I didn't sit down and consciously aim to make it funny, but it is all pretty absurd, and you have to deal with that. You can't ignore it.

"So I let the play go wherever it wanted to go. A world where both joy and sorrow exist was created, instead of two separate worlds. They both have to be played full out. The play isn't about disease, but about choosing to care for other people, or not. And how love creates transcendence. But that wasn't preplanned. I discovered it in the writing. And it is mainly funny."

SCOTT MCPHERSON: THE AUTHOR'S DEATH NOTICE...

Scott McPherson; Actor, 33, Author of a Hit Stage Play
By Bruce Lambert, The New York Times
© November 08, 1992

Scott W. McPherson, an actor and playwright who wrote "Marvin's Room," an award-winning Off-Broadway hit, died yesterday at his home in Chicago. He was 33 years old. He died of complications from AIDS, said a friend of his, Andrew Patner.

Mr. McPherson recently finished the screenplay for a film of "Marvin's Room" being produced by Robert DeNiro. The stage version won the Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards. Its lead actress, Laura Esterman, won an Obie, and Mr. McPherson won two awards as the author.

The play is about Bessie, who is dying from leukemia and taking care of her father, Marvin, who is bedridden from terminal cancer and strokes, and his sister, Ruth, whose spine is disintegrating.

Despite the play's grim setting, Frank Rich of The New York Times called it "one of the funniest plays of this year as well as one of wisest and most moving."

Mr. McPherson was born in Columbus, Ohio. Moving to Chicago, he wrote for local television and acted in four theater companies, including a production of Larry Kramer's AIDS play, "The Normal Heart." He wrote two plays, " 'Til the Fat Lady Sings," which was produced, and "Scraped."

Next was "Marvin's Room," performed first in Chicago then in Hartford. The play moved to New York City's Playwrights Horizons last December, then to the Minetta Lane Theater, where its run ended in September.

Mr. McPherson is survived by his mother and stepfather, Peggy and John Sansbury of Upper Arlington, Ohio; a brother, Mark of Columbus, and five stepbrothers and stepsisters.

MARVIN'S ROOM: A CRITIC'S FOLLOW-UP...

THEATER: In 'Marvin's Room'
By Alvin Klein, The New York Times
© October 17, 1993

By the time "Marvin's Room" opened Off Broadway in December 1991, it waswidely known that Scott McPherson, the playwright, had AIDS. Inevitably, the play, which confronts terminal illnesses with dark humor, was perceived in a new context.

"Marvin's Room," has nothing to do with AIDS, but it has everything to do with caring and unconditional love. Mr. McPherson, who died last November at 33, was a startling new voice in the American theater. Here he wrote of an eccentric family, somewhere in Florida. Bessie, 40 years old, devotes her life to her bedridden father, the unseen Marvin and her daft semi-invalid Aunt Ruth.

"Dad's dying, but he has been dying for about 20 years - he is doing it real slow so I don't miss anything," Bessie casually tells a thoroughly addled doctor in the play's first brief scene, and then Bessie is diagnosed as having leukemia.

An absurdist tone that Mr. McPherson said in an interview "tells people it's O.K. to laugh" is established straightaway. And this is even before we learn that hugging Aunt Ruth means you are in for a shock. The embrace activates the pain-relieving electronic device in her brain, which, in turn, makes the garage door open. Noisily. Or that Monopoly hotels are stuffed into Marvin's respirator.

"Marvin's Room" comes out of a serious and intense belief that the world is a grotesque joke, but there is a healing power in it. Coming from levity, Mr. McPherson caught the audience with sudden, probing scenes of truth and closeness between Bessie and her estranged sister, Lee, and between Bessie and Lee's son, Hank.

Bessie must be one of the most truly good, giving characters in dramatic literature. There is real nobility in her, nothing saccharine. "I'm scared, and I'm trying to be brave," she says knowingly, rather matter of fact. The ending of "Marvin's Room" is amazing. Bessie, at Marvin's bedside, reflects the dancing light from his lamp with her compact mirror, and they laugh. It casts an aura of wonder. This is what a work of art does.

MARVIN'S ROOM: THE MOVIE...

"Marvin's Room" was a 1996 film adapted for the screen by the playwright's Scott McPherson and John Guare. It was directed by Jerry Zaks. It stars Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, Diane Keaton, Robert De Niro, Hume Cronyn, Gwen Verdon, Hal Scardino and Dan Hedaya.

Original music for the film was provided by Rachel Portman and has Carly Simon singing the theme song "Two Little Sisters" with Meryl Streep adding background vocals.

Produced by Robert DeNiro with a stellar cast, the film received only moderate reviews, opened to a lukewarm box office, and quickly disappeared to DVD.

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Barn Players “Marvin's Room” Dramaturgy © 2011; Ross Harmon.

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