Mary Page Marlowe tells the story of a woman’s life over the course of several decades, complicated by her personal choices and circumstances. The play, produced by local theater company ShenanArts, debuts in Staunton Friday, June 19, and runs through Sunday, June 28. WMRA’s Calvin Pynn, spoke with the director and filed this report.
Mary Page Marlowe is an accountant in Ohio leading a rather ordinary life. At first glance, sounds like a low-stakes premise, but like a close look at any given individual’s life, there’s more to it than that.
CORI McDANIEL: As you get into the details and see the different choices that she's made and how those choices affect her, it really paints a picture of a really complex woman.
Cori McDaniel is the play’s director.
McDANIEL: And I feel like it really mirrors what a lot of our audiences may feel about their own lives.
(Sound of play rehearsal)
Young adult Mary Page Marlowe: “I just think that as a woman, a lot of our roles get stipulated for us, y’know? There’s only one way to be a wife, be daughter, be a mom, be a…lover.”
McDaniel said, in this story, the small moments in Mary Page’s life are just as impactful as the milestones.
McDANIEL: We really get a great sense in this show of both really big moments, things like divorce and wedding and different marriages, different children. You see some of the big pivotal moments in her life, but you also see really mundane, ordinary things, things that audiences may have experienced themselves. Sitting and eating spaghetti with your spouse while you watch TV, rehearsing for a talent show, having a sleepover with friends. Those are the kind of things that, in a traditional narrative, those sort of scenes would get edited out. But here they really, they really provide have weight and impact and really show how most of our life is lived in the in between moments.
The play was written by Tracy Letts, whose credits also include August: Osage County and Superior Donuts. The play premiered in Chicago in 2016 before opening Off-Broadway two years later. Like the original run of Mary Page Marlowe, the character’s life is depicted from childhood to her golden years by five different actors.
In the ShenanArts production, Mary Page is played as a young adult by Hattie Markham and Emmie Hays; as a full-grown adult by Catherine Gilbert; in middle age by Jacquie Patteson and as a senior by Blair Baron.
To give each iteration of the character their own personality, McDaniel directed the actors separately.
McDANIEL: When you have a younger and an older version of a character, there's a lot of desire to want to dress them similarly, put them in similar colors, try to find people who look like each other, try to have them match mannerisms. Maybe they all like to twiddle their fingers in a certain way. I really wanted to focus on the different individual personalities and the different individual strengths of each of these actresses. I purposely told them at the first read through, I said, don't watch each other. I want you to make your own choices and have your own interpretation of this character and who she is.
That decision went back to Letts’ interpretation of the character he wrote.
McDaniel: He said he was really drawn to this idea of: “When I look back on myself in the past or I think about myself in the future, those people are almost like strangers. I almost can't recognize who I was at that point because I was just, I was such a different person then.” And there's a line in the show where she [Mary Page Marlowe] says: “It really feels like a different person who went through that. Someone else could have written my diary.” So I felt like by keeping these actresses separated during most of the rehearsal process, you would really kind of pick up on this fact of, wow, yeah, we really are such different people at different points in our lives. We're never exactly the same person.
(Sound of play rehearsal)
Older Mary Page Marlowe: I didn’t say that. There were a couple of doozies, but who doesn’t? Who wouldn’t do things differently if they could?
McDaniel said this glimpse at the many different stages of Mary Page’s life could mirror the audience’s own experiences, and she hopes those who see the play leave with a new sense of self compassion.
McDANIEL: The number one thing that I really hope audiences come away with this is that they give themselves grace. We do see Mary Page not always at her best. She does make some poor choices here and there. So I really hope they come away in the end loving this character the same way we've all come as a cast and crew have come together to love her and can sort of look back on their own lives and choices they've made and potential regrets that they've had or things like that and just go: “You know what? Like Mary Page, I was just doing my best in the moment. And I can look back on my past self and give myself grace and love and acceptance.”
For WMRA News, I’m Calvin Pynn.
