Stage

...The titular room fnlls the back of the stage, and through the wall we can see in silhouette Marvin in bed and Bessie sitting beside him...

...One of the characters, a whore decked out in lateStoreyville, early-Paris Is Burning working clothes, punctuates the action by reading juicy tabloid tidbits of erotic nastiness...

...Of course, a play's a play, and AIDS is not a metaphor...

...Unidentified Human Remains, which came to New York from Canada and Chicago, might be seen as a kind of grotesque comedy, one that begins not in soap opera but in sex-and-slash journalism...

...The run of the play may have had less to do with whatever serious point it wanted to make—"about the sexual desperation of people trying to love and create relationships in the world we live in now," said director Derek Goldby platitudinously in the Chicago Tribune (February 17, 1991)—than to the fact that all the characters managed to remove their clothes on occasion...

...There is, then, a certain thematic similarity between Marvin's Room, which is at the Playwrights Horizons, and Human Remains, which recently finished an off-Broadway run of several months, the first declaring for life in the midst of death, the second for love in a society of disconnection...

...I found the fully clothed Marvin's Room more provocative...

...It's a disease, and all diseases are real...

...The aunt's soap opera appears at fnrst to be no more than a recurring humorous point, but it is central to the work...

...GERALD WEALES Commonweal 31 January 1992: 27...

...Whatever their similarities, they are very different plays...

...He isn't...

...Even if the play began as a guying of soap opera, it went quickly beyond that satiric commonplace...

...The play is a sexual mélange in which David, who loves straight Bernie, chooses to cruise as a way of avoiding commitment of any kind, and Candy, his roommate, tries to find a stable attachment, at one point sampling a lesbian possibility...

...Marvin's Room comes to New York from Chicago and Hartford, bringing with it several performers from the earlier productions, most notably Laura Esterman as Bessie, the play's chief dying life-figure...

...Note: In a fnt of abstraction or senility I identified Kevin Heelan as a black playwright in my review of Distant Fires (Commonweal, December 20, 1991...

...her troubled nephew has returned to the family...

...As my description in the paragraph above indicates, the catastrophe overload in Marvin's Room suggests the convoluted plots of soap opera, and it may be that at some point in the creation of the work—at an early stage of the writing perhaps or only in the back of the playwright's mind— McPherson intended a parody of soap opera...

...At the end of Brad Fraser 's Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love, three of the principals—the gay protagonist, his almost straight female friend and roommate, and the young man who loves him but is still uncertain about his sexual orientation—clutch one another, declaring the possibility of love against most of the evidence of the play itself...

...a light—a flashing mirror which is one of the few things to which Marvin reacts—plays around the room...

...Now there's a point of light for you...

...in pointing out Esterman, I do not want to disparage the rest of the cast in a fine production, but she is remarkable as she shifts from her all-elbows, all-knees comic style to a tough seriousness that escapes the sentimentality which could easily smother this kind of material...

...Race aside, he is simply a talented playwright...

...and most of the group have assembled offstage in the batty aunt's room (she has dressed elegantly for the occasion) with snacks to witness a marriage in the aunt's favorite soap opera...

...she and her impossible sister seem to have reconciled their irreconcilable differences...

...There is apparently still a strong titillation factor in naked pseudo-couplings on stage...

...While all the combinations form and re-form, there is an offstage serial killer stalking the city, and anyone who has ever seen a movie or a play will know immediately that it is Bernie, even though it takes the other characters a long time to find out or to admit this obvious fact...

...The laughter remains and becomes part of the lifeaffirming quality of the play, but McPherson has moved on to a consideration of the embrace or the avoidance of caring, the conflict between Bessie and Lee, her abrasive sister, who finally sees that Bessie has made a positive life out of what Lee first believes is a sacrifice of self...

...The playwright is suffering from that disease, but he has found a metaphor on which to end his play...

...That might explain why the play is so funny, despite its subject matter, and why the medical scenes seem closer to the old doctor routine in burlesque than to General Hospital...

...Brad Fraser provided in the program a thumbnail sketch of his native Edmonton (the play's setting) as a "plain sister" among Canadian cities, at once boring, preposterous, and violent, and he may have intended his play as a true picture of the dark underbelly of the city where loneliness, indifference, and cruelty flourish...

...In a New York Times interview (November 10, 1991), McPherson described the play as about "love and the power of giving yourself to someone else," and indicated that it both is and is not an AIDS play...

...STAGE TOUGH LOVE, FALSE LOVE 'MARVIN'S ROOM' & 'HUMAN REMAINS' At the end of Scott McPherson's Marvin's Room, the protagonist, whose leukemia is apparently incurable, continues to bustle about caring for her bed-ridden, brain-damaged father...