Will Broadway be receptive to a revival of Marvin’s Room? It has its best shot with the largely subscription audience that comes with this fine Roundabout Theater Company production under the direction of Anne Kauffman. With leading roles played by the equally outstanding Janeane Garofalo, Lili Taylor, and Celia Weston, the sad/funny play by Scott McPherson, with a plot dealing with chronic physical disability, mental disorder, and the process of dying, isn’t the downer you might expect. It has been twenty-five years since I first saw this play at Playwrights Horizons. It remains a touching consideration of all of the above. The core of it is given to a remarkable pivotal character named Bessie (Lilly Taylor) who reaffirms for us the value of unselfish giving and the blessing in avoiding martyrdom. Although the play is principally about Bessie, a 40 year-old spinster who has devoted the better part of her adult life caring for her terminally ill father (the title character) and his ailing sister, it also revolves around an extended family circle forced to deal with physical and emotional transitions. Marvin, the totally paralyzed victim of strokes and advanced cancer, is never seen but is revealed through a screen as an occasionally shrieking shadow whenever his daughter Bessie and his aging and innocently forgetful sister Ruth (splendid work by Celia Weston) make their regularly scheduled administering visits, often entertaining him with a display of lights that appear to bounce off the wall. Things don’t improve when an over-tired Bessie is diagnosed with leukemia in an unexpectedly funny scene at a medical clinic presided over by a flaky and flagrantly incompetent doctor (Triney Sandoval). Bessie turns for help to her estranged, unmarried, cosmetology-trained sister Lee (a terrific Janeane Garofalo), a noticeably bi-polar woman saddled with two even more emotionally troubled sons, one a teenager under treatment at a mental institution for burning down his home. Lee makes the trek from Ohio to Florida accompanied by Hank (Jack DeFalco) who has just been conditionally released in her care and Charlie (Luca Padovan), a severely myopic introvert who faces life head down in a book. Splendid work from both DeFalco and Padovan. The joy and the power of the play comes from watching Bessie neutralize the negative energy around her and triumph over the neurotic self-centeredness of her support group. On close inspection, McPherson’s play delivers a defiantly positive prognosis. Neither depressing nor altogether absurdist with its assertively comical tract, Marvin’s Room welcomes the gently empowering lift it gets from Kauffman’s unforced direction and from a cast that doesn’t miss a heartbeat of the play’s inherent poignancy or the compulsively funny sick room jokes. Lily Taylor, who doesn’t appear often enough on Broadway or Off, is wonderful as a pathetic figure of stooped and scrawny resignation. She somehow grows beautiful before our eyes as she is forced to summon up hidden resources of strength dealing with her self-absorbed sister, the troubled sons, the aunt whose brain has been wired to alleviate the pain in her back, her father and, of course, her own mortality. Designer Laura Jellinek’s modernist revolving setting gets us from one emotionally cathartic scene to next.
