February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The play, at Urban Stages home space on West 30th Street through Nov. 13, is hardly playwright MacIvor’s first exposure to a New York audience.
In 1998, “Never Swim Alone,” another play requiring a trio of performers, won the award for overall excellence at the New York International Fringe Festival, and then, two years later, his dark melodrama, “See Bob Run” was a highlight of the off-Broadway season.
In 2001, “In On It” turned up at PS 122, received good notice and won a Village Voice Obie Award. With all this activity, MacIvor still found time to perform two solo pieces, “Monster” and “Cul-de-Sac,” on off-Broadway stages.
“Marion Bridge,” set in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where MacIvor was born in 1962, concerns itself with three alienated siblings coming to grips with the death of their mother and the changes the event makes in their lives.
The MacKeigan sisters, Agnes, Theresa and Louisa, are as disparate, as unalike, as the ill-matched chairs which surround the kitchen table of Carol Bailey’s excellent stone-floored setting.
Agnes, who lives elsewhere, is a disturbed, alcoholic actress, mainly unemployed, summoned home to Cape Breton because of the imminent passing of the family matriarch.
Theresa is a nun, resident of a religiously-oriented commune where, in the words of the hostile Agnes, she “farms for God.”
Louise is the family oddball, a woods colt who invests more belief in “Ryan’s Cove,” the television soap opera to which she is addicted, than she is able to bring to bear on any aspect of the “reality” surrounding her.
While their unseen mother lies upstairs, robbed of speech by cancer of the larynx, the sisters squabble, argue, compete and once in a while, console each other, and, most significantly, reveal themselves in MacIvor’s sensitive, incisive writing.
The recently arrived Agnes, defensive, harsh-mouthed and desperate, is clearly terrified at the thought of climbing the long flight of steps which will bring her into proximity with her mother’s bedroom.
Relying on a bottle of white wine in a nearby cabinet, she makes excuses for not facing her dying mother. She will, of course, do it “tomorrow,” when she’s had time to rest.
Theresa, in her modernized, neutralized clerical garb, ruling over the family home like a ship’s captain astride the bridge, is clearly someone who is accustomed to being in charge. She is also resentful, and, by some malign verbal skill, manages to demean and diminish the damaged Agnes with her every utterance, even the most innocent-seeming remark.
The childlike Louise, ageless, nearly sexless, and, at first, seemingly borderline mentally challenged, appears to have no awareness of anything beyond the lives and concerns of Kara and Justin in the TV serial which occupies so much of her time, and the “people” they encounter, aliens, vampires, and “identical cousins” not excluded.
That Louise is “odd” and has always been so is just about the only thing on which Agnes and Theresa can agree without a verbal skirmish or two.
The speech-deprived mother, mentally alert, communicates with her daughters through small slips of paper resembling Post It stickers, on which she scrawls letters and symbols, the precise meaning of which is clear to the girls, particularly to Theresa, who is after all, the primary caretaker.
The letter P, for example, means she needs a trip to the bathroom. Once in a while, the old woman scrawls a childish heart, meaning that, at that moment, at least, she is experiencing feelings of love and affection.
Director Susan Fenichell’s actresses are superb. Henny Russell’s needy Agnes is knife-sharp, but transparent enough to make the eventual softening credible.
Christa Scott-Reed’s self-sacrificing nun, often referred to “Saint Theresa” by the bitter Agnes, is a flawless portrait of glossy efficiency masking a core of frustration and disappointment.
Susan Louise O’Connor, who plays the stunted, fantasy-addicted Louise, probably the youngest of the MacKeigan sisters, and, by all evidence, the most homebound, is something of a MacIvor veteran, having been seen as simply Susan O’Connor, in the dazzlingly original “Never Swim Alone” at the Fringe, and then in the title role in “See Bob Run,” the “Bob” having been short for Roberta.
Louiseless or not, O’Connor is simply a star in the off-Broadway crown, a gifted character actress still too young for the types of role which, decades ago, made Mildred Natwick and Mildred Dunnock famous.
With less time onstage than either of her “sisters,” and far less of a backstory, O’Connor makes the tiny, drab, enigmatic Louise unforgettable. She is an actress whose time will come, and it is to be hoped that it comes soon.
MacIvor, in writing a play involving a triad of blood-related females, is virtually daring people to compare ‘Marion Bridge” to Chekhov’s “Three Sisters.” Apart from the trio of siblings, both works contain references to a second place, an alternate location, which plays a part in the characters’ lives.
For Chekhov’s heroines, it was Moscow, which they longed to visit, and which, scholars say, was only a relatively few miles distance from the sisters’ country estate.
MacIvor’s “Moscow” is the tiny town of Marion Bridge, which the sisters’ expiring mother seems to have regarded as an ideal summer retreat, a view not necessarily corresponding to the feelings of Agnes, Theresa and Louise.
Louise claims never to have visited the village that gives MacIvor’s play its title, but Agnes and Theresa disagree with her, and are convinced that she accompanied them on at least one journey to Marion Bridge.
Daniel MacIvor is an accomplished, skillful and inventive playwright whose work ought to be more familiar to New York audiences. “Marion Bridge,” well-produced by Urban Stages, should earn him an enlarged public.