Theater Review: A clever Mary Page Marlowe is Tracy Letts' most recent exploration of humanity

Mary Page Marlowe

Written by Tracy Letts

Directed by Lila Neugebauer

2^nd Stage Theater Group

August 13, 2018

Writing a timeless classic work must be a form of a curse. The rest of your output will always be compared to it, and nearly always fall short. Just think of Georges Bizet (Carmen), Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time) and Toni Morrison (Beloved). We ask “What else did they write?”, even though each did create other works, often with excellent results. This separates these artists from the mega-stars like Shakespeare, Eugene O’Neill, James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, and Verdi, who wrote multiple outstanding works, and for whom the question instead is “Which is their best work?”. It now seems that playwright/actor Tracy Letts may join the first list, but not the second. His August, Osage County (2008) is the best theatrical work of our century. But two of his other plays I have seen recently, Man from Nebraska (2003) and Mary Page Marlowe (2017), while powerful and intriguing, fail to rise to its structurally and dramatically integrated height. Man from Nebraska, a meandering saga of a conservative man who has a big-time middle age crisis, is full of compelling writing and dialogue, but fails to center on a clear purpose. Mary Page Marlowe, which I saw this week at 2^nd Stage Theater, is more ambitious. It gives us peepholes into the life of a woman from birth until old age, played by six actresses (and a plastic baby doll). The various Mary Page Marlowes are #1-3 and 4-6 below:

The single act is played out in 5-10 minute vignettes, seemingly random in time sequence. As we learn a little bit from each vignette, we gradually surmise that her life has had some major family and personal tragedies, the specific nature which is only revealed near the end. Letts is very clever in how he paces this, stimulating our curiosity but not giving things away with obvious foreshadowing devices. There are only a couple of intensely emotive scenes, one with a therapist, the other with one of her three husbands. The latter was gripping, as her pain and denial could only emerge with nonverbal chokes and gagging. The oldest Mary Page, being treated for an unstated illness, appears rather early in the play, and gives us no sense of tragedy or culmination, or even that there were many problems in her life. This reminded me of Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood (2014), where lots of dysfunction occurs, but the end result is still a pretty normal and conventional teen. Both authors seem to say that life is filled with highs and lows, but the end human product is pretty much the same in 90% of the cases. It’s an implicit favoring of nature over nurture as the main guiding principle of our behavior. This worldview could be either reassuring or enervating, depending on one’s own views. In this play, the multiple random-sequence vignettes serve to both explain the big events of Mary Page’s life, but also allow us to see how she mostly stays the same (alcohol abuse, individualism, repressed desires) throughout her life, much as a re-viewing of the sequentially presented Boyhood allows us to see how a real boy retains many of the same characteristics over time. The difference is, we are not aware of these messages as we watch Boyhood, since we do not know how he will turn out, while Lett’s hints of preceding tragedy keep us on our toes in Mary Page Marlowe, looking for clues to what we think will probably happen.

Both of these works is driven by a theatrical device (six age-specific actors in Mary Page Marlowe, the same young actor in Boyhood, filmed by the director over 10+ years), and in a way, the cleverness of each device prevents either work from achieving a true sense of artistic unity. Plays and novels (not to mention operas) are inherently unreal things, with intentional manipulation of real life by the author in order to achieve a larger purpose. We accept Othello, Willy Loman, Blanche duBois, and Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus as compelling human types that fill us with reflection, yet none is a photograph of a real person, nor do we need them to be. In these two works, Letts and Linklater have created sort of a fiction-nonfiction hybrid, where we are viewing a life through a scientific lens that simulates actual observation through a hidden camera. Somehow, for me neither hybrid work added up to a fully realized creative whole. In Mary Page Marlowe, some of this was due to uncreative block-like staging on a plain pastel-clad set that looked like a lab Formica or tiled surface. Was this intended to make us into observing scientists, reviewing the data of her life? 

Rather like bad opera, actors walked in, turned, did their 5-10 minute scene, then exited. Only at the end, in a nice visual device, did the various Mary Pages appear together on stage. A perhaps more compelling (but more sci-fi) play would have had included some interaction between the different-aged Mary Pages: how would we give advice to our younger selves? How would we inspire our tired older selves? Instead we are left with a mystery play (what were these tragedies in her life?), and once the mystery is solved, we are left with the conclusion that none of it really mattered that much, people are just people. While true, this misses the high drama that August, Osage County or The Ferryman brought to the stage and to my mind, an unreal sculpting of reality that makes me think of its messages years after I first saw it. Tracy Letts seems to have an inventive, experimental mind not content with reliving old successes. I hope he hits on another one. Eugene O’Neill emerged from an early experimental phase to produce his late masterpieces (The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey Into Night), successful plays perhaps because they integrated and built upon his earlier experiments. We can only hope Letts has a similar outcome.