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Anne Kauffman’s luminous revival for the Roundabout tends to McPherson’s legacy with grace. She plays down the wildness of the humor, and the first act leans toward placidity. This strategy pays off later, however, as Taylor’s performance—gently weird, shadowed with defeat—takes bloom. Without pushing its virtue too hard, the play movingly depicts a world in which loving others is, as it often has to be, its own reward
It might be surmised that some quarter century later McPherson’s bleak comedy might have lost some of its sting, now that the central metaphor of illness – the ghostly presence of the AIDS crisis – has somewhat abated. But in fact “Marvin’s Room,” seen today in the director Anne Kauffman’s delicately hued but big-hearted production, seems as mordantly and ruefully truthful as ever. Maybe more so. As baby boomers struggle with issues of end-of-life care for their parents, and indeed themselves, and health care (mental and physical) has become a defining issue, if not the defining issue, in American political life, “Marvin’s Room” feels even more acute and piercingly funny.
But Marvin’s Room, exquisitely human and tenderly compassionate, doused with anarchic humor, lives, vibrant as ever, in Anne Kauffman’s wonderful revival for the Roundabout Theatre Company, giving the play its overdue Broadway debut at the American Airlines Theatre.
Anne Kauffman’s luminous revival for the Roundabout tends to McPherson’s legacy with grace. She plays down the wildness of the humor, and the first act leans toward placidity. This strategy pays off later, however, as Taylor’s performance—gently weird, shadowed with defeat—takes bloom. Without pushing its virtue too hard, the play movingly depicts a world in which loving others is, as it often has to be, its own reward
