THEATER REVIEW : There’s Life in This ‘Room’

What the Old Masters understood about suffering, wrote W.H. Auden, is “how it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” In “Marvin’s Room,” Scott McPherson’s 1990 play now at the Tiffany Theater, it takes place at a bench in Disney World, with only a person in a cartoon-gopher suit to wave for help.

McPherson died at age 32, soon after his play opened to acclaim at New York’s Playwrights Horizons. The playwright seems to have had a preternatural understanding of what he would need to know in this life. “Marvin’s Room” centers on Bessie (Mary Steenburgen), a woman who has devoted most of her adult life to caring for her sick father Marvin and dotty aunt Ruth (Jane Cecil). McPherson penned this black comedy before he met his lover, Daniel Sotomayer, whom he nursed until Sotomayer’s death from AIDS, and before he himself was sick with the disease.

McPherson understood, for instance, the absurdist humor he would need to face the horror of a doctor who discusses an incurable illness with the sensitivity of a mechanic telling you to junk the car. When we first encounter Bessie, she is having blood taken, bravely smiling while Doctor Wally (Tim Monsion) forgets her name and then drops the information that the nurse quit because of a “deep-seated phobia about cockroaches.”

In Steenburgen’s touching performance, we understand immediately that beyond Bessie forced smile, she lives in an almost constant state of grace, taking care of two elderly dependents without any bitterness, dealing with her own impending death without despair.

Bessie’s estranged sister Lee (Jean Smart), however, has a harder time with grace. Unlike Bessie, Lee is the recipient of charity--she has been taken in by nuns. Smart is vibrant and funny as the confused, brassy blonde single mom struggling to be civil to one son, Hank (Cad Cox, looking a little like the young, very intense Orson Welles), on leave from a mental institution, and another, Charlie (Jonathan Charles Kaplan), who’s so internalized that he reads Isaac Asimov at Disney World. Lee’s idea of positive reinforcement is to greet Hank’s news that “they’re not strapping me down anymore” with “well, don’t abuse that privilege.”

When Bessie finds that she needs a bone marrow transplant, Lee hauls her sons down to Bessie’s Florida home, perhaps to atone for the guilt of a sibling who has let her sister single-handedly care for an aging father.

Watching these people nervously reunite, and grow from a group portrait of guilt to a true family, a theatergoer will begin to understand the metaphorical place that McPherson called “Marvin’s Room.” Literally, Marvin’s room is at the back of the stage, behind a glass so thickly beveled that we can barely see what goes on there.

This is the room where Bessie gives her father his pills, changes his diapers and where the man makes wonderful cooing sounds when Ruth waves a compact mirror that catches the light and sends it dancing off the glass. This is the place of dying, but also the place where people learn what it means to give love with no thought of gain.

McPherson, obviously, was quite young when he died and was not yet a fully formed dramatist. Although she can be tough, Bessie’s selflessness borders on the saccharine because she really never veers from it or shows any desire other than to be of help to others. Dennis Erdman’s direction of the play is a lower key, more naturalistic one than the simpler, bolder tone that David Petrarca took when he directed the play in Chicago (where it originated), Hartford and New York.

Erdman’s direction unfortunately sometimes emphasizes the play’s one main fault: that Bessie is not really a person so much as she is an ideal, a kind of perfect fantasy for the dying. Steenburgen delivers Bessie’s epiphany, in which she defines her life as the sum of the love she has felt for other people, straight out to the audience in a dead-on way that underlines the importance of what is obviously Bessie’s big speech.

But Smart’s less sentimental role is delivered beautifully, with perfect comic timing in both her bottled hysteria at dealing with her son’s behavioral problems and her struggle to absorb her sister’s grace in facing the responsibilities of true adulthood.

Along the way, “Marvin’s Room” raises one of the great mysteries of black comedy. Why do we laugh at Jean Smart’s horrified expression after she takes a peek at her decaying, urine-soaked father or when we hear Marvin’s uncomprehending moans when he thinks he’s hallucinating when he sees his two grandsons. One reason is because McPherson perfectly sets up the jokes, but the more important reason we laugh is because we can.

Although he never got the chance to be an Old Master, Scott McPherson did live to create a room, mysterious behind thick glass, for the very sick and also a place for the very lucky. “Marvin’s Room” is a theatrical landscape where people come together and amaze each other with bright lights for a while before the inevitable.

* “Marvin’s Room,” Tiffany Theater, 8532 Sunset Blvd., Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Sundays, 3 and 7:30 p.m. Runs through mid-November. $32-$34.50. (310) 289-2999. Running time: 2 hours.

Mary Steenburgen Bessie

Tim Monsion Dr. Wally

Jane Cecil Ruth

Jeb Stuart Bob

Jean Smart Lee

Jane Galloway Dr. Charlotte

Chad Cox Hank

Jonathan Charles Kaplan Charlie

Cynthia Mace Retirement Home Director

Craig Wells Marvin

Produced by Paula Holt and Susan Alschuler in association with Patricia L. Glaser. Written by Scott McPherson. Directed by Dennis Erdman. Costumes by Luke Reichle. Lighting by Ken Booth. Sound by Peter Stenshoel. Wigs by Carol Doran. Original music by Rob Milburn. Production stage manager John Hagen.