Marvin’s Room reviewed by Rob Stevens

The cast of Marvin’s Room (all photos by Larry Sandez)

Scott McPherson’s Marvin’s Room is receiving a solid production under the assured direction of Thomas James O’Leary at Actors Co-Op in Hollywood. Nicholas Acciani’s turntable scenic design swiftly and easily transforms into various locales from a comfy living room to a loony bin reception room, from a bug-infested doctor’s office to an amusement park room for lost children.

Marvin is never seen is Marvin’s Room and neither is his room really, just people entering and leaving it. Marvin is bedridden with many and sundry health conditions after a stroke. His eldest daughter Bessie (Francesca Casale) has been his caregiver for nearly two decades. As she says, “Dad is dying slowly so I don’t miss anything”. Bessie also looks after Aunt Ruth (Crystal Yvonne Jackson) who has been riddled with back pain from collapsed vertebrae since childhood. That was until she had electrodes implanted in her brain that she controls with a battery pack she wears. Unfortunately, it also makes the automatic garage door open if she uses it in the kitchen, letting the “neighbors know her business”.

The play opens in a doctor’s office where inept substitute Doctor Wally (Brian Habicht) is attempting to draw seemingly gallons of blood from Bessie to determine why she has been feeling so fatigued. The diagnosis is leukemia and soon Bessie’s estranged sister Lee (Tara Battani) is Florida bound to be tested as a bone marrow donor. Lee arrives with her two sons, Hank (Dean Hermansen) and Charlie (Marek Myers) who never knew they had relatives in Florida. Lee had to get Hank released from a mental hospital where the 17-year-old was confined after setting their house on fire, a fire that spread through the neighborhood. The younger Charlie always has his nose buried in a book but is doing poorly in school. This family puts the dys in dysfunctional. Lee will never be Mother-of-the-Year material. Her goal in life is to get her beauty degree and find a man to love her. Bessie’s leukemia becomes aggressive quickly and none of the three relatives are a match as a marrow donor. Bessie is desperate to find someone to take her place as family caregiver, but it won’t be Lee. She’s never been able to care for people in her life, making that decision long ago after watching her mother die and her father suffer a stroke. The cast, led by Casale and Hermansen and including Justin Bowles as Doctor Wally’s even more inept brother/receptionist and Kimi Walker as a kindly psychiatrist and an officious managed care facility manager, inhabit their roles–bringing out the humor or the drama as needed.

For that is what playwright McPherson has so skillfully wrought, a true dramedy that has you laughing out loud one moment from the outrageous dialogue and situations and then easily tearing up as the raw humanity of life slaps you in the face. Seeing the play again after nearly two decades (the 1994 Tiffany Theatre production starred Mary Steenburgen and Jean Smart and the 1996 film had an even more star-studded cast-Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Robert DeNiro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Gwen Verdon), I was struck and saddened by the great loss the theatre experienced with the death of McPherson from AIDS at age 33 in 1992, just as his play was winning awards. Marvin’s Room was only his second play, and it showed such brilliance you longed for more. His writing was very much in the vein of my favorite living American playwright, Christopher Durang. Durang deftly combines outrageous humor with gut-wrenching pathos, most clearly experienced in Laughing Wild, Beyond Therapy and The Marriage of Bette and Boo. McPherson even worked a few “nun” jokes into his script. Sister Mary Ignatius would be so proud. At one point, Lee questions why Bessie has wasted her life caring for others, working for their love. Bessie explains that it is not the love she has received from her father and aunt but the love she has been able to give to them while caring for them that makes her life feel fulfilled. That is the basic tenet of McPherson’s play, and it is a very loving and human feeling. See Marvin’s Room and laugh and love and feel.

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