STAGE REVIEW : ‘Butterflies’: View of a Marriage

“Apocalyptic Butterflies” is a war play. Its battlefield is a small kitchen in a small house in Fryeburg, Me. Its combatants are Hank and Muriel, and its skirmishes continue the one martial confrontation that will never be fought to more than a draw: the War Between Men and Women.

Playwright Wendy MacLeod doesn’t dig too deeply into character in her razor-sharp domestic comedy at the Zephyr Theatre, and needn’t to prove her points. Her antagonists are not merely icons for an unhappy wife turned harpy and an inadequate husband turned Neanderthal bully. They are signposts of disaster for any relationships in which self-motivation and self-gratification erode the structure of the union itself.

An earlier play than MacLeod’s “The House of Yes,” currently at Las Palmas Theatre, “Butterflies” is painted in broad strokes, and the madness of MacLeod’s method is reminiscent of that earlier “War Between Men and Women,” the culmination of James Thurber’s lifelong exploration of the battle of the sexes. The edge of both humorists’ wit is sharpened by an underlying bitterness. As Thurber applied his discomfort with relationships to illuminating their absurdity, MacLeod uses her discomfort with their modern equivalent to define some of the timeless barriers in domestic partnership.

MacLeod puts it right on the line, and so does Stephen Caffrey in his no-holds-barred direction. He calls a shrew a shrew and a clod a clod, but never allows his actors to overindulge. They shriek at each other interminably, but within the director and playwright’s outlines. They’re crying for understanding and, like many couples, can’t do it at normal volume.

Paul Raci and Elizabeth Hanley are the foes, and handle the couple’s anger with compassion and a great deal of humor. But they’re somewhat overshadowed by Megan Mullally’s gem of a performance as Trudy, a woman Hank picks up during “24 hours on his own.” Mullally pinpoints all the facets of Trudy’s twisted logic, and her line readings glisten with comic brilliance. Peg Shirley provides gentle wisdom as Hank’s mother, and Jerry Tullos has a nice nuttiness as his father, though Tullos, the only cast member using a New England accent, lets it slip a couple of times.

MacLeod wants us to laugh at her couple’s plight, and we often do. We know that as soon as they sit down and start to communicate, half their battle is won, even though we go along with Thurber’s prophecy that there will never be a full armistice.