Aisle Say On The Square: The Summer Sleepers

I have very little memory of the first NYC production (1992) of the acclaimed play Marvin’s Room (1990). I have an only-vague impression of finding it an uneasy mix of sincerity and near-surrealism that…well, I don’t remember whether I liked it or not. I think I understood why so many other people seemed to cotton to it, but I personally wasn’t feelin’ the love. Or if I was, it just refused to stick. It may or may not be a barometer of anything that, despite the auspicious success of its first, fresh exposures, and a well-regarded film adaptation five years later, the play nonetheless vanished from public consciousness and the general repertoire of plays regularly performed, not long thereafter.

Whether it was unjustly neglected or too much an artifact of its era to “stay with us,” in the manner of How I Learned to Drive and Wit is impossible to know for sure, but I’m happy to report that the current Roundabout revival on Broadway makes a decent case for its reconsideration. The play concerns two sisters, Bessie (Lili Taylor), saintly caretaker of their dotty aunt Ruth (Celia Watson) and father, who has been dying by increments (out of our sight, behind the walls of an upstage room) for 20 years—who has now, herself, been diagnosed with leukemia—and Lee (Janeane Garafolo), a wisecracking, psychologically unstable free spirit who has not helped with the caretaking; and who can’t control her criminally inclined teenage son Hank (Jack DeFalco), both of them being somewhat less mature than her younger, studious son, Charlie (Luca Padovan). But in coming to help Bessie cope in the wake of her diagnosis, Lee and her sons are exposed to Bessie’s unquestioning acceptance of them, and instant love of nephews she has barely if at all known previously. And transformative, light bearing things start to happen in the midst of ever-darkening prospects.

Why should the play now strike me as more resonant than previously? Combination of things. (1) I’m not who I was; older, different, more evolved, my world a hugely wider canvas than it was back then; and (2) Director Anne Kaufman’s production is unambiguously “realistic,” if that’s the word. Again, this just may be a trick of memory, but what I recall as an occasional incongruity of tone has been eradicated. Ms. Kaufman has deftly located the sweet spot that balances comedy and pathos, without sacrificing either. It’s the kind of balance Mike Nichols used to be famous for, and it ain’t easy.

But of course, the illusion is making it look easy, and abetted by a swell cast, in particular Ms. Taylor, Ms. Kaufman gives Marvin’s Room a greater sense of literary permanence than it has had before. And that’s not unimpressive either.

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I cannot, online, locate the source of this aphorism (I remember being told it was George Bernard Shaw), but whoever said it was wise nonetheless, when he advised that, in the dramatization of ideological conflict, you give your villain, or anyway, your antagonist, the best arguments. That’s almost literally what’s going on in Dominique Morriseau’s Pipeline (at the Mitzi Newhouse in Lincoln Center).

Put over-simply, it’s the story of Omari (Namir Smallwood) a high school age, inner city black kid with a history of behavior problems, who has just become a third-strike offender when he pushed a teacher. When the play starts, he is running off, leaving behind his girlfriend (Heather Velasquez)—and leaving his mother Nya (Karen Pittman), who is also a teacher, to find him and then figure out how to navigate school and legal authorities…and her ex-husband, Omari’s father, Xavier (Morocco Omari), a white-collar professional who thinks it’s time to be the hands on single parent. Collateral but related drama involves Laurie (Tasha Lawrence), a white colleague of Nya’s, whose tough “survivalist” technique gets unexpectedly tested; and school security man Dun (Jaime Lincoln Smith), who is all too aware of being just one man in a house of many doors.

As you can divine, Pipeline is not precisely a story with antagonists—more a collection of disparate, desperate characters—and their differences are less strictly ideological than bone of emotional/intellectual navigation…but what holds is your being presented with a character you think you know, within a familiar setting…and then as the drama digs deeper, you find that under the surface lie characters a lot more complex than you imagined they were; more articulately assertive and/or defended than you thought they were, more able to see the other side than the other side might have assumed, which makes disagreement anything but clear cut, or outcome inevitable. Especially when it’s a layer withheld—or a layer revealed—that makes all the difference and distinguishes what’s true from what’s truer.

Because you only get to deeper layers by starting at the surface, Pipeline takes a little while to start cooking; but once it does, the boil only gets hotter. Caveat? The argumentative layering is so comprehensively written, the characters so good at anticipating self-evident rebuttal and circumventing it with surprising perception, that you can find yourself a bit too consciously aware of an author at work, not only in the service of covering complex ground, but ennobling the kinds of characters who aren’t often dramatized with such well-rounded dignity, particularly in these situations. But then again, in infusing familiar territory with so much fresh insight, it’s probably natural to err on the side of Shavian thoroughness.

Under the direction of Lileana Blain-Cruz, the cast is uniformly splendid in making this a forceful, full-blooded and very rewardingly human experience.