Sisters Lee (Janeane Garofalo) and Bessie (Lily Taylor) reunite after eighteen years in Marvin’s Room (photo by Joan Marcus)
American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Through August 27, $47-$127
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org
Scott McPherson’s 1990 play, Marvin’s Room, is finally making its Broadway debut, in a touching and funny Roundabout production directed gracefully by Anne Kaufman. The work, which focuses on the complex relationship between two sisters, ran in New York at Playwrights Horizon and the Minetta Lane Theater in 1992-93, winning two Drama Desk Awards (including Outstanding Play) and an Obie, and was then turned into a film in 1996 with an Oscar-nominated Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Gwen Verdon. For its Great White Way bow, it has enlisted a pair of fab actresses to portray the sisters. Lily Taylor stars as Bessie, a forty-year-old woman who has been caring for her ailing father, Marvin (Carman Lacivita), and her partially incapacitated aunt, Ruth (Celia Weston), in their Florida home for decades. “Dad’s dying but he’s been dying for about twenty years. He’s doing it real slow so I don’t miss anything,” Bessie tells Dr. Wally (Triney Sandoval), who is filling in for her regular physician. “And Dr. Serat has worked a miracle with Ruth,” she adds. “She’s had constant pain from her back since she was born, and now the doctor had her get an electronic anesthetizer; you know, they put the wires right into the brain and when she has a bad pain she just turns her dial. It really is a miracle. . . . If she uses it in the kitchen our automatic garage door goes up. But that’s a small price to pay, don’t you think?” The scene’s elements of vaudeville slapstick prepare the audience for Bessie’s discovery that she is sick as well. Her sister, Lee (Janeane Garofalo), arrives from Ohio to offer assistance, along with her two boys, Charlie (Luca Padovan) and the older, deeply troubled Hank (Jack DiFalco). It’s not exactly the most heartwarming of family reunions as everyone tries to decide how far they’re willing to go to help.
Ruth (Celia Weston) and Bessie (Lily Taylor) have their hands full in Broadway debut of 1990 Scott McPherson play (photo by Joan Marcus)
Garofalo (Russian Transport, The Truth about Cats and Dogs), in her Broadway debut, and Emmy winner Taylor (Aunt Dan & Lemon, Six Feet Under) get the sibling thing just right; they even look somewhat similar, and more so as the play continues. Taylor plays Bessie with a soft vulnerability beneath her hard shell, while Garofalo is excellent at keeping Lee’s motives just under the surface. Whenever they are together, Marvin can be seen in silhouette lying down in the bedroom, a constant reminder of what drove the sisters apart. Tony nominee Weston (True West, The Last Night of Ballyhoo) provides comic relief as the slow-moving, God-fearing Ruth, who refers to a bowel movement as a “stinky.” The set by Laura Jellinek (The Nether, The Wolves) easily slides from kitchen to doctor’s office to hospital room to retirement home while Obie winner Kauffman (Marjorie Prime, Belleville) moves the story at a calm pace despite the occasional fireworks. The play was inspired by childhood memories as well as a different play McPherson was writing, about an AIDS clinic. McPherson later cared for his partner, a cartoonist and activist who died of AIDS in February 1992 at the age of thirty-three; McPherson, who also wrote Scraped, passed away from AIDS complications later that year, at the same age. Marvin’s Room is a tragicomic story that boldly addresses the question of what happens when a caregiver needs a caregiver as well as a bittersweet reminder of the weight of family responsibility and heartbreaking loss.
BAMcinématek’s three-week tribute to Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme, who passed away in April at the age of seventy-three, continues with a pair of outstanding concert films. In April 2005, Neil Young underwent brain surgery for an aneurysm. Four months later, he gathered together friends for two special nights at Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium, captured on film by Demme, who had previously helmed such fab music docs as Stop Making Sense and Storefront Hitchcock. Neil Young: Heart of Gold was an intimate portrait of man who looked death in the face and survived; the film featured acoustic songs primarily from Young’s beautiful Prairie Wind album. But the Godfather of Grunge wasn’t about to let a little thing like a brain aneurysm stop him from rocking in the free world. As he continued his long-term project of reaching deep into his past for his archival box sets, he released Chrome Dreams II in October 2007, a sequel to an unreleased 1977 album that was rumored to include such future Young classics as “Pocahontas,” “Like a Hurricane,” “Homegrown,” and “Powderfinger.” For Chrome Dreams II, Young strapped on the electric guitar and held nothing back, joined by longtime partners in crime Ralph Molina on drums, Rick Rosas on bass, and Ben Keith on guitars and keyboards.
The BAMcinématek screening of Neil Young Trunk Show will be preceded by another stellar collaboration between Jonathan Demme and Neil Young, Neil Young: Heart of Gold. In March 2005, less than a week before a scheduled operation for a brain aneurysm, Canadian country-folk-rock legend Neil Young headed to Nashville, assembled friends and family, and in four days recorded one of the best — and most personal — albums of his storied four-decade career, Prairie Wind. On August 18, he had recovered enough to put on a poignant show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, captured on film by Demme, whose previous music-related works included Talking Heads in Stop Making Sense, Robyn Hitchcock in Storefront Hitchcock, and videos by the Pretenders and Bruce Springsteen. The concert film begins with brief interviews with band members as they prepare for the show; Demme does not harp on Young’s health but instead focuses on the music itself and the warming sense of a family coming together. And what music it is.
In 2011, Franco-British documentarian Max Pugh was asked by an elder monk to make a film about Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching tour of the United States and Canada. Pugh, whose younger brother had become a Buddhist monk studying with Thich Nhat Hanh, teamed up with codirector Marc J. Francis to follow the popular Vietnamese master as he and his monastics visited various towns and cities in North America before returning to their home base, 
