By: David de Young
Directed by Rob Melrose
Marc Halsey, Michelle Barber and Phillep Callen in Pen - Photo by Michal Daniel
Run time is two hours with a 15 minute intermission.
Directed by Rob Melrose, Pen, the most recent play from actor/playwright David Marshall Grant, opened at the Guthrie Theater in the Dowling Studio November 7th. The play originally debuted in 2006 at Playwrights Horizon in New York.
The two-act play (six scenes with a 15-minute intermission between acts) features a cast of three and takes place on Long Island in the final weeks of 1969. Matt (played by Marc Halsey) is a high school senior trying to figure out his future, as high school seniors are prone to do. His mother Helen (played by Michelle Barber) is a victim of multiple sclerosis, and her neediness and self-pity are throwing a bit of a wet blanket over Matt’s final year of high school. Matt’s father Jerry (played by Phillip Callen) is a psychologist and aspiring self-help author who left his wife after she became ill is about to run off with a younger woman.
It’s a typical story really, about people attempting to find themselves while faced with the challenges and pains of reality. But the way Grant holds the story and characters up for examination in the light of the theater elevates both above their melodramatic, even soap opera-ish surface-level description.
The audience is introduced to the characters two at a time as they interact. In scene one, Matt and his mother spend time at home watching television. We see that Helen doesn’t even want him to leave the house to go to a movie let alone go off to college clear across the country. In scene two as Matt and his father dine in a restaurant, we get to know a man who, despite his profession and the fact that he’s writing a book with the premise that we all can be happy if we want to, still has a lot to work through.
Because Pen has so much groundwork to lay in the first 30 to 45 minutes, some may find scenes one and two a little slow moving, but things speed up suddenly at the end of scene three when things take a dramatic and completely unforeseeable (not exaggerating here) turn, which I will only say ties cleverly into the title of the play. The second act is a crescendo of interactions leading up to the play’s final scene which takes place on New Year’s Eve, the last night of the 1960s. An earnest drama, with moments of memorable humor, Pen succeeds in the important areas, and I left the theater with no complaints.
Pen runs through November 25 in the Dowling Studio. Tickets are priced from $18 to $34 and are on sale through the Guthrie Box Office at 612.377.2224, toll-free 877.44.STAGE and online at www.guthrietheater.org.
Location Info:
Guthrie Theater
Artist Info: Guthrie Theater
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