THE STORY: Bessie lives in Florida where she cares for her aunt and ailing father, Marvin. Aunt Ruth has several collapsed vertebrae and has to wear an electrode pack on her waist with which she can both control her constant pain and open and close her garage door at will. Unable to speak, and confined to his bed for years, Marvin’s only entertainment comes from someone bouncing beams of sunlight, reflected from a small mirror, around his room. Bessie learns amidst all this illness that she has leukemia and that her only hope is to contact her long-estranged sister Lee to see if her bone marrow is compatible for a transplant. Lee reluctantly makes the trip to Florida from Ohio, bringing along her two sons, one of whom has just been released from an institution after a wave of arson. The reunion of the sisters is uneasy at best, with long buried recriminations coming to the surface even as love slowly overwhelms Lee’s veneer of selfishness and glib denial. Bessie’s challenge becomes to reunite Lee and her son Hank before he rejects her forever for her years of neglect. One by one, Lee and her sons are tested for the transplant, but none of them will be able to donate to Bessie who, for the moment, seems to have gone into remission. Against Lee’s urging that Bessie take it easy, Bessie refuses to condemn Aunt Ruth and her father to nursing homes, claiming that only by caring for them herself will she make her own illness bearable. During a trip to Disneyland, Bessie collapses. Lee and Hank, however, have finally begun to communicate as a result of Bessie’s attentions to them both. As the bad news accumulates, the play ends with Bessie taking shelter in her only refuge: In answer to her father’s cries of discomfort, she selflessly abandons her own despair and helps him to bounce the day’s remaining sunlight around his room.
Winner of the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Play, the John Gassner Award for Best New American Play, and the Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award.
“When the American theater gains [a] voice this original, this unexpected, you really must hear it for yourself. What separates MARVIN’S ROOM from so many synthetic American plays…is that even at its occational sunniest, it never lies or sentimentalizes the truth. Mr. McPherson does not pretend that people always die with dignity, either, or that everyone isn’t dying. Instead he asks, What good can we do with the time, however much or little it is, that we have left before our inevitable harsh fate arrives?…My first impulse after seeing Mr. McPherson’s play was to gather those I care about close to me and take them into MARVIN’S ROOM so that they, too, could bask in its bouncing, healing light.” —The New York Times.
“…written with a blazing, tender accuracy that grips you with the force of revelation…” —Village Voice.
“…the themes of death, love, duty, care and service are frugally intertwined in a play of considerable emotional resonance. Laughing one minute, we are shuddering with a stealthy empathy the next. Death has rarely seemed more interesting or love so complex.” —New York Post.
