MARVIN’S ROOM
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
These are flaws of inexperience and immaturity. Marvin’s Room is the work of a young man; if playwright Scott McPherson could return to the script with a few more years’ experience behind him, he might address its shortcomings and come forth with a genuinely first-rate play. But McPherson died last November of AIDS, at the age of 33. His death followed a long struggle with illness that to those who knew him and his lover, Danny Sotomayor, echoed the plot of Marvin’s Room, in which a person devoted to caring for dying loved ones suddenly is faced with her own impending death. McPherson’s life and the politically charged issue of AIDS have given this play an aura that outshines its actual strength. That’s fine with me: a heroic rallying point is just what’s needed in the war against AIDS and the bigotry it still stirs. But I wish Marvin’s Room–even in the Goodman Theatre’s beautifully acted production–didn’t fall prey to its own schematic contrivances.
Set mostly in Florida, Marvin’s Room is the story of two estranged sisters reunited by medical emergency. Unmarried Bessie, who has spent many years caring for her bedridden father and crippled aunt, is diagnosed with leukemia. Her sister Lee, a stylish, slightly slutty divorcee with two teenage sons, comes to Bessie’s home to see if she or her boys can donate bone marrow to save Bessie’s life; also on the agenda is what Lee will do with her aged, infirm relatives if Bessie can no longer take care of them. At first mystified and slightly repelled by Bessie’s devotion to her father and aunt, Lee and her 17-year-old son Hank–long at odds with each other–achieve a tentative rapprochement due to Bessie’s near-saintly influence. Meanwhile Bessie is filled with new understanding and appreciation of her love-filled life as she nears its end.
Above all, Marvin’s Room glows with the confident compassion of a superb nine-person ensemble. Carol Schultz and Mary Beth Fisher dominate the action as Bessie and Lee, capturing the clash between the sisters’ affection and alienation; Chuck Huber as the standoffish but attention-craving Hank is also memorable. They and the rest of the cast give Marvin’s Room the breath of intense, unpredictable life–even when the play itself runs out of that breath.
