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Masthead
A CurtainUp Review
Fifty Words
By Elyse Sommer
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. . . I do love you, Adam. I mean, the whole deal. Like we were just before. And like we are now. And in a bunch of other ways that probably haven't even happened yet. It's a stupid word, "love." There should be fifty words for it, like Eskimos have for snow..—Jan
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Elizabeth Marvel & Norbert Leo Butz
(Photo: Joan Marcus) |
The war Weller examines in the play that just opened the Lucille Lortel Theater is fought strictly on the home front. It begins and ends in the Brooklyn brownstone home of two people who, like so many who promise to love and honor each other for better or worse, find that a marriage, like a war fought with guns and bombs, can move from minor skirmishes (what Fifty Words' Adam and Jan refer to as bad patches) into an all-out and brutal conflict.
The chief weapon in Weller's marital war drama: Words. The chief casualty: The couple's child. The chief causes: Neurotic displacement of mid-life disappointments, insecurity, not to mention infidelity and a heretofore unexpressed taste for rough sex.
This battle royal plays out in a single night, from 9:10 pm to 4:15 am. But the complex mix of love and resentment, connect and disconnect, has built towards this night for eighteen years — eight as a couple in a relationship, ten as a married couple.
It's a story that isn't exactly the new, new thing , either on stage or screen. The Tyrones' Long Day's Journey Into Night and Martha and George's day-into-morning brawl in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? come to mind. Ingmar Bergman's most famous film, Scenes from a Marriage (1974), dissected the unravelling marriage of Marianne and Johan through endless conversations, apologies and ultimately, a bang-up fight. In American Beauty (1999), Carolyn and Lester portray yet another acerbically incompatible couple.
With the divorce rate continuing to rise as fast as the national debt the subject of dysfunctional marriages is ever relevant, but that's not what makes Fifty Words a fresh and intense theatrical experience. The reason to see the MCC production is that Norbert Leo Butz and Elizabeth Marvel are sheer dynamite as the latest pair of battling spouses to veer from loving to biting conversation, from tender to more violent embraces, from mutual admiration to hurtful putdowns and revelation. Marvel has lived up to her name in plenty of dramas, so this is one more feather in her feather studded cap. Having seen Butz in Buicks (review), I'm not surprised that he is her perfect mate — at least in terms of acting ability— even though most people know him best for his comedic and musical roles ( Is He Dead, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Last Five Years). Both Marvel and Butz deliver Michael Weller's incisive dialogue with biting naturalism and make the most of the frequent spurts of humor.
Director Austin Pendleton gets things rolling with a silent scene that ends in a wink — but that wink conveys more than words that all is not quite as cozy and comfortable as implied by Neil Patel's handsomely designed and carefully furnished downstairs of Jan and Adam's house. Jan enters the front door and rushes to the phone, as Adam comes down the stairs and rushes by her to the kitchen. No sign of the eye and body contact one expects from a working couple seeing each other after separate work days.
That flash-by opening scene is one of the few non-verbal moments you're going to see. Jan's phone call with their young son Greg (an important character though never seen except via the inclusion of toys in Patel's set), establishes that he's on a sleepover date with a classmate who lives in Staten Island. The significance of young Greg's sleepover is revealed bit by bit: It's an important milestone in the youngster's life, giving his parents hope that it will mark the beginning of the end of his apparent lack of friends and problems at school. It's also a chance for Jan and Adam to have a much needed evening alone together, something that hasn't happened much because his architect business has involved frequent out of town trips and her still fairly new business buying and selling online data bases has contributed to an apparent lack of intimacy (in every sense) between them.
As Weller's smoothly scripted onion of a play reveals a problem that Adam and Jan are experiencing as parents, each subsequent layer that's unpeeled shows it to be connected to yet another problem in their relationship. It turns out that Adam's out-of-town work is prompted by problems in his business (but with time out for an affair), and that Jan's career is hardly something to make a former dancer feel fulfilled. Even the long-ago first meeting they reminisce about is not just a promising sign that they click sexually, but a sort of acting out of deep-seated personality conflicts.
Edmund Bergler, the late psychiatrist and prolific writer about marital problems, would have found Jan and Adam a fitting case history for his book Conflict in Marriage: The Unhappy Undivorced. As a theater goer who appreciates fine acting, you won't want to miss seeing Marvel's and Butz's exquisitely nuanced portraits. Just don't expect to go home with definitive answers for rescuing these and other seriously mismatched spouses from turning into Humpty Dumpties whom all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put together again.
For another two-hander about a married couple whose long marriage is punctuated by squabbles but which relies on a more gentle tone, you can follow up MCC's Fifty Words with the Keen Company's revival of Jan de Hartog's The Fourposter. For details, check out our Off-Broadway listings.
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Fifty Words By Michael Weller Directed by Austin Pendleton Cast: Norbert Leo Butz and Elizabeth Marvel as Adam and Jan ' Sets: Neil Patel Costumes: Mimi O'Donnell Lighting: Michelle Haback Original Music: Josch Shmidt Sound: Fitz Patton Stage Manager Pamela Edington Running Time: approximately 95 minutes, without intermission MCC THEATER at the Lucille Lortel Theatre 121 Christopher Street www.mcctheater.org. From 9/10/08; opening 10/01/08; closing 10/25/08--extended to 11/08/08. Reviewed by Elyse sommer September 27th press matinee |
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