Do you know that feeling when you're late to the party and then feel like you shouldn't have bothered to show up at all? That's how I felt about 10 minutes into Tracy Letts' "Mary Page Marlowe" at The 2nd Stage. Even the usually reliably fine direction of Lila Neugebauer failed to make this play feel more than a poorly written soap opera following the mostly tragic life of one Mary Page Marlowe from her teen years to her cancerous 60's. Although there were some decent performances, especially that of Blaire Brown as the aging Mary Page, most of the casting was a cheap attempt to elevate the production by casting celebrity children and television actors. That said, Tatiana Maslany from "Orphan Black" was fine as Mary Page at age 27 and 36. But Meryl Streep's daughter Grace Gummer as Mary Page's mother Roberta, continues to demonstrate that the best actors do not necessarily beget great actors. This is the second play in which she has underwhelmed me, the first being Stoppard's "Arcadia" where her acting chops were well beneath her cast mates. Letts' play is somewhat copying the device that Clare Baronn used to great success in "I'll Never Love Again" where she cast her teenage self with actors of all ages, sexes and ethnicities to brilliant effect. Here, Letts casts several actors as Mary Page at different stages of her life. But some of the actors blur together and don't present any great age difference. It might have been better for Letts to stick to one or two actors and flesh out the play which feels like a series of scenes strung together. I also had the take-away that Letts doesn't really understand women. This is an occasion, another example being "The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Grace B. Matthias" last year at Playwright's Realm, where a woman's story is perhaps not best serviced by a male playwright.
