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NY Theater:  "Mr. Marmalade" An Ironic View Of Marriage

Quirky, inventive drama mixes 4-year-old's games with adult angst

By Lucy Komisar

Lucy has an imaginary playmate called Mr. Marmalade  He is not your usual childhood make-believe friend. When he arrives dressed in a black suit and toting an attaché case, he announces, "I've carved out some time." For the first shock, Lucy asks, "Why don’t you touch me any more? Is there somebody else?"

Suppose you mixed a child's penchant for fantasy with what she is seeing around her. Suppose a child understood a lot more than adults gave her credit for. You might come up with Noah Haidle's very original and engagingly quirky comic drama about a child's view of adult relationships.

A little girl's fantasies turn her child's tea party "guest" into the seductive man who may have charmed, wedded, and mistreated her mother. Four-year-old Lucy conjures up a world of love followed quickly by betrayal and loneliness.

Director Michael Greif creates a slightly surreal mood, in which Lucy is not playing at being an adult, she is one. Her regression to the "tea party" becomes a jarring reminder.

In the course of the action, Mr. M (coolly depicted by Michael C. Hall) is alternatively solicitous and nasty, snows her with sushi from Noho (a restaurant in Manhattan) in an elegant candelabra-lit dining room and is abusive. He snorts cocaine. Lucy declares, "I deserve better than you."

Marmalade is also violent, hitting his aide and yes-man, Bradley (David Costgabile). He becomes beer guzzler. Is this what she saw in her parents' marriage?

Her mother (Virginia Louise Smith) is a waitress who has had a hard life, a failed marriage and what appears to be a succession of one-night-stands.

Sometimes Lucy takes on an adult's guise even in a child's situation. She talks on her cell phone. "Teenagers -- it's an awkward time," she comments about her babysitter (Smith), who has just arrived. "Have you had sex with your boyfriends?" she inquires of the girl.

The babysitter's boyfriend (Michael Chernus) shows up with his kid brother, 5-year-old Larry (Pablo Schreiber), with whom Lucy plays doctor. "You may need a heart transplant," she tells him. "Do you have health insurance?" He replies, "Not that I know." Her matter-of-fact and truthful answer in 21st-century America: "Then there's nothing I can do."

After a couple of play-dates, they play house. He is in an oversized suit; she in her mother's heels and blue satin gown. "Honey, I'm home," he declares in 1950s "man-goes-out-to-work-little-lady-stays-home" talk. But now that they are playing house (are married), he inquires plaintively why she no longer wants to play doctor (have sex).

Gummer is perky and appealing as the child woman. Hall brings an appropriately sinister undertone to Mr. Marmalade. Schreiber creates a sense of wounded innocence as the little boy who Lucy twists around her finger.

This is the kind of inventive drama the Roundabout Theatre should do more of.

"Mr. Marmalade." Written by Noah Haidle. Directed by Michael Greif. Starring Mamie Gummer, Michael C. Hall, Pablo Schreiber, David Costabile, Virginia Louise Smith Michael Chernus.

Roundabout Theatre Company, Laura Pels Theatre, 111 West 46th St. Tue-Sat 7:30pm; Wed, Sat, Sun 2pm. Running time 1:30. Through Jan. 29, 2006. $51.25-$61.25. 212-719-1300. http://www.roundabouttheatre.org/.

by Joan Marcus.

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