Love in Ruins

By T.E. Kalem

PAST TENSE by Jack Zeman

Houses do not have lives of their own. When they are bare, they are emptied of life. Something has died. In Past Tense, currently having its world premiere at the handsome new quarters of the Hartford Stage Company in Connecticut, the deceased, aged 23, is a marriage.

As Past Tense begins, the stage is not quite bare. The stripped-down living room contains two sets of hand luggage--his and hers--and a sofa shrouded in a white slipcover, symbolic, perhaps, of a once warm marital bed. But Emily (Barbara Baxley) and Ralph Michaelson (George Grizzard) soon fill the room with the emotional furnishings of their life together. So much of love is shared experience that a permanent parting seems unreal.

Long-married couples are experts at small talk, but it has resonances that outsiders cannot guess at. Using the common language of memory and observation, Zeman, 32, crowds a barren stage with children growing up, leaving, marrying and having children of their own, of a husband's ordeal by alcoholism and his conquest of it, of Emily's witnessing her small son being crushed by a truck. The true protagonists are pain, humor, fury, the terrors of aloneness, a remembrance of good sex past, and an abiding perception of love amid its ruins.

This play is likely to alter its coloration depending on who plays the two parts. Barbara Baxley's Emily is crisp, managerial as well as motherly and yet touchingly vulnerable. George Grizzard's Ralph is Little Boy Blue, destined never to grow up yet always capable of a last-ditch courage bordering on the heroic. It is the most compassionate portrayal of a man that Grizzard has yet achieved.

Middle-aged couples, recently divorced, might better bring a tourniquet than a handkerchief to Past Tense. This is a drama that is its own imperative. The most congenial of mates will take it home, not because they necessarily want to, but because they have to.

-- T.E. Kalem

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