The Whole Point of Life

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

MARVIN'S ROOM by Scott McPherson

A hardened, sinewy blond who is almost succeeding in fighting off the encroachments of middle age tells her unstylish, homebody sister how sorry she is that the homebody threw away her life caring for their bedridden father and addled aunt. The care giver insists she has no regrets: "I can't imagine a better way to have spent my life." Later she explains, "I have had such love." She does not mean her elderly wards' love for her -- they are often cross or ungrateful -- but rather hers for them. She is not confessing to neurotic possessiveness or bidding for sainthood. She simply believes that loving is the whole point of life.

That poignant exchange is at the moral heart of Marvin's Room, an unflinching yet surprisingly funny play about illness, physical and mental, that opened off-Broadway this month after runs in Chicago and Hartford. Playwright Scott McPherson, 32, has an original voice, balanced between sentiment and surrealism, and a gift for creating characters who are more than the sum of their behavior. He also has AIDS, which gives him premature sensitivity about the importance of help and healing but imperils his talent just as it is emerging.

Bessie, the care giver, connects tenderly with her harsher sister's teenage sons, one a powder keg of anger who burned down his neighborhood, the other a bespectacled Milquetoast who perpetually retreats into a book. She also has a wonderful speech recalling her only romantic love, a carnival worker who drowned before her eyes when a partying crowd onshore mistook his desperate pleas for habitual clowning. Amid the grim reality, McPherson's characters take childlike delight in simple things and maintain a giggly sense of humor. Bessie's father Marvin, unseen but for his shadow through a glass-brick wall, has been dying for two decades -- "real slow," Bessie explains with a hint of asperity, "so I don't miss anything." He still chortles in glee on seeing beams of light bounce off a hand-held mirror and play around the room. Bessie's sister, told she cannot smoke in a hospital, replies with steely illogic, "I'll be very quiet, then," and lights up. The daffy aunt, addicted to a soap opera, dresses to the nines for a character's wedding.

Director David Petrarca, who has staged the show in each of its venues, handles the shifts in tones with equal measures of delicacy and boldness. Laura Esterman, who has played Bessie since the beginning, nonetheless has an aura of uncalculated spontaneity in the hardest sort of role, a character of true goodness who is still approachable and fun. Mark Rosenthal and Karl Maschek as the boys, also cast since Chicago, have been ably joined by Lisa Emery as their mother and Alice Drummond as their dotty great-aunt.

For all the fun, the arc of the story is doom. It begins with Bessie's being tested for mysterious bruises that signal leukemia. It ends with her facing quick death, knowing she must abandon the father and aunt she has served so long and the nephews she has begun to help. The true tragedy, the most apt AIDS metaphor, is that the world needs more people like her and is about to have one less.