performance

A Mammoth Review

By Gary Tischler

September 2008

Photo: Meghan Grady and Eli James

Amid an eye-popping two-house, Caligari-like set, Playwright Jason Grote’s “Maria/Stuart” kicks off with a kid on a phone in the kitchen, talking to his cousin. A graphic novel artist and writer, he’s describing his newest creation, featuring a super-hero named “American Male”, battling cold-war Russian nemeses named after plays by Chekhov.

“Last, there’s ‘Uncle Vanya’,” he says. “He doesn’t have any super-powers.”  Listening to this, it sounds so fresh, so witty (in a literary-referenced way), and so now. A graphic novel creator as half-the-title character. How early 21st Century, and how Woolly Mammoth.

Next thing you know, a crazed, wraith-like figure emerges from a door, it’s the very person he’s been talking to on the phone, channeling a changing, shape-shifting, writhing persona mouthing gibberish in German, no less, guzzling and spilling soda pop from the fridge, leaving a pink piece of paper, departing in a cloud of what looks like chalk, with one last word. “Poof.” Wow. How magical realism, how, well, hopefully different. But then again, how not.

No matter how smart, no matter how outrageous, no matter how now, many of today’s contemporary playwrights, with an otherwise finely tuned sense of the ironic, and a serious tendency toward the gross, can’t get away from the main ingredient and staple of American plays from O’Neill to Williams, which, in a nutshell, is the burden and after-life of secrets, specifically family secrets. Think of the many sins of Eugene O’Neill’s Tyrone clan, from “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” to “A Touch of the Poet”. Think of the father with cancer, the football star with a guilty, drunken secret in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, or Blanche’s true history in “Streetcar”.  Happens all the time. In those great American family theatrical closets, there are gays, drunks, drug addicts, adulterers, frauds, swindlers, crooks, and murderers.

Contemporary plays are no different although the secrets seem to be drawn from the files of “Law and Order SVU” more often than not. The thing about secrets, though, is that while they might elicit a certain amount of surprise and/or laughter, they rarely shock any more. Pop culture and the Internet have made sure of that.

So, while Grote is both clever and passionate, and often very funny in “Maria/Stuart”, and writes great part for actors, there’s a sense of disengagement here. The predicament of all the characters should elicit some awesome sort of empathy. It may be that it’s just too clever by half, and that by making the comparisons that he makes, he leaves the audience outside looking in.

The Stuart of the title, an appropriately awkward Eli James, lives in a world of women, his mom, an efficient, pragmatic single-parent Marnie, his aunt Lizzie, a boozy, foul-mouthed, sexy, haunted woman, his cousin Hannah, who he still lusts after, and grandma Ruthie, the entirely daffy, inappropriate matriarch. There’s also Aunt Sylvia, who once tried suicide long ago, and has heavy medication ad two prosthetics to show for it.

The occasion: grandma’s birthday and how to survive it in one piece.

So there are immediate questions: what’s with the shape-shifter visitations, and why is it sending faxed messages to the clan? How did Aunt Sylvia come to lay herself on the railroad tracks years ago?  Why are almost all the women hot for Stuart? (Mom and grandma excepted?). Therein lie the secrets, such as they are.

A bigger question is “Maria/Stuart”, as in the title and why did Grote compare the family struggles here to the German playwright Friedrich Schiller’s play about Mary Queen of Scots and her cousin Queen Elizabeth, a struggle for power that ended badly for both? While this is an interesting connection, you have to think, who knows Schiller these days? Does it matter if you don’t?

I don’t think so. Like some other Woolly Mammoth productions (“Cooking with Elvis” comes to mind), great acting saves the day in an over-long play.  Watch and see what Sara Marshall and Naomi Jacobson do with grandma Ruthie and Aunt Sylvia, the true eccentrics of the play, and then see how Amy McWilliams as Marnie and Emily Townley as Lizzie play off them in steely, tart fashion.

At one time or another, almost all of the characters are channeled by the shape-shifter, and it’s Marshall who succumbs smoothly to the exchange, blurring the distance between real and very unreal in a flash. Jacobson is given sickly comic things to do with her hand prosthetics, (drinking, smoking and eating), and accomplishes them so cheerfully that you forget for a second that Aunt Sylvia is a deeply wounded spirit.

Note too that Stuart’s job is a kind of safe haven and heaven, it’s where he can speak fluidly talking about comic books, but is rendered helpless and hopeless dealing with life in this country of women, where sex and violence ripple below the surface and denial is so huge that it causes blackouts.

“Maria/Stuart” doesn’t lack for drama or for outrageous moments. It’s a little like watching a 30-car pileup in progress.  You can’t look away.  The set, two homes almost buried under a stack of closets, cabinets or coffins, looks always as if it will collapse in on itself.  It’s something you can also say about the structure of the play. ”Poof” indeed. (“Maria/Stuart” runs through September 14 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre).

Performance continued on page 28

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