A pair of married, white-collar men, Art and Ben, sit at a table with drinks. Art tells Ben that he dreamed the previous night about making love to Ben’s wife. The time and place were unclear to him but the room was composed of marble. And he enjoyed the experience.
Ben then goes home to his wife, Catherine. Catherine tells Ben that she dreamed she made love to Art last night too. Again, the time and place of the sexual congress were unclear. But she knows smooth, cool marble was in the picture. She appreciated her night, too.
That is the most intriguing premise of the new show from the storied Gift Theatre, “Marble,” by the distinguished Irish playwright Marina Carr.
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Were these matching dreams a mere coincidence? A cruel joke? A shared mystical experience? Or did both parties to this dreamed infidelity (if that qualifies as infidelity) discover an especially unusual way of telling their spouse that their marriages with children were over?
Just a few minutes in, you will find yourself intrigued. And I doubt at any point thereafter you will find yourself ahead of the play.
You certainly could see the beautifully written “Marble,” which premiered at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 2009 but has not been previously been produced professionally in Chicago, as a portrait of the death of two middle-aged marriages, on the grounds that the two husbands involved either never really knew their wives, or did once, but became unable to cope with how the women they thought they knew changed over time.
In terms of its level of emotional intimacy, of its depiction of ordinary suburban lives of quiet desperation, it brings to mind the work of Harold Pinter and Edward Albee, especially “Betrayal” and “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?”
But Carr focuses mostly on the two women in these fraught pairings; the husbands are mostly clueless or generally better wired to live an unexamined life until it is taken away.
As a consequence, Carr wrote blistering roles for two of Chicago’s best actresses, Brittany Burch and Cyd Blakewell, the former playing a woman who feels far more than her share of existential dread and the latter essaying a woman who prefers to drown any such feelings in red wine. Both of these artists deliver extraordinarily potent performances in director Kay Martinovich’s production, staged in a space on the second floor of the historic Copernicus Center in Jefferson Park.
Burch’s Catherine is a font of pent-up desire: “I want spectacular,” she declares, which perhaps explains why her sex dreams are on luxe marble. With Blakewell’s Anne, it feels like every revelation is a cruise missile headed for her heart that she wants only to intercept and neutralize.
As the husbands, Paul D’Addario understands his role as a cypher, mostly, while John Gawlik, playing a man who feels deeply wronged by nocturnal emissions he cannot control, shows us a figure who gets darker and more desperate by the moment.
Carr really does bring up a lot of philosophical questions in this beguilingly poetic play. “Why are we given such yearnings?” Catherine asks, speaking for anyone who wants more from their marriage than they are likely to receive. At one point, she puts you in mind of Nora in “A Doll’s House,” at another, an Irish “Medea” with a nice house and a decanter on the sideboard. At the most intense times, playwright Sarah Kane’s work popped into my head as a comparative.
Aside from its anatomizing of two marriages in crisis, “Marble” also charts the slow burn of how simple spousal resentment can, over time, morph into a monstrous hatred, leading in turn either to fantastical escape, maybe, or, more likely, the self-protective extinction of desire and hope. It’s quite the searing couple of hours, and yet dispensed with poetic panache and, counterintuitive as it may seem, also a wry sense of humor.
From the design point of view, Gift Theatre’s production mostly makes use of the found space here, which does not really match the script to my mind, and I think Martinovich’s production also could have used more overall drive, as well as rhythmic tightening in places, ideally increasing the tension, especially at the end of Act 1. A greater level of detail could be achieved without too much expense, such as a ringing cellphone that does not emerge from speakers many feet away.
Still, regular fans of Gift will already be aware of the quality of the acting typically on offer at this exceptional Chicago company and they will not be disappointed here, also a credit to Martinovich. These are complex, Chicago-style performances in a beautifully wrought drama all too aware of the challenges of the lived human, marital experience.
See it with your partner! Or see it and be glad you don’t have one.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
Review: “Marble” (3.5 stars)
When: Through Aug. 30
Where: Gift Theatre at the Copernicus Center, 5216 W. Lawrence Ave.
Running time: 2 hours
Tickets: $45-50 at 773-283-7071 and thegifttheatre.org
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