The Marriage of Bette and Boo

Roundabout Theater Company

Generally, all of the plays I've seen at this theater have lacked that certain je ne sais quoi. There has consistently been a final ingredient missing that's pulled the whole production together into a concise whole.

The Marriage of Bette and Boo was different. It was complex, marvelously acted, interesting and got better the next day after thinking about it.

The first thing you remark on after leaving the theater is the remarkable pace of the play. To get through 39 scenes, the play simply has to keep moving; it can stop for no one and linger on nothing. This production ably kept the pace up through both acts.

Bette and Boo takes you through an entire marriage starting with the wedding day and ending finally with the death of Bette. It's not a romanticized, sweet, gooey version of marriage either. Two main problems plague the couple. First, there is Bette's overwhelming desire to keep trying to have children when her babies are reliably and continuously stillborn, due to the incompatibility of her and Boo's blood types. And, then there is Boo's drinking which drives Bette crazy and turns her into a horrible nag, or vice versa depending on your perspective. The picture is filled out by the one child that did survive and in-laws on both sides.

It would be so easy to stage this as a messy living room comedy-drama. But, instead the whole thing is framed (an aesthetically accurate term, actually) by candy box red velvet on an almost sterile stage. This framing provides a good counter to both the comedy and drama of the play. The set was simple, but also delightfully very complex.

As we all know, marriage is acutely difficult. And, I like someone pointing out how difficult it is to escape the problems that plague our relationships over an entire lifetime, until just at the very end they finally don't seem to matter anymore. It's also interesting how sometimes we let the problems eclipse the relationship so that we don't develop fully together.

One nice aspect of the play is that all four marriages on display in the play were just awful. Everyone should have felt better about their own relationship after seeing this. They were exaggerations, with some truth I think, but they were so bad that if your marriage compares it might indeed be time to get out or dramatically change.

The sets were superb, the directing was superb, but I need to explicitly say that the acting was marvelous. It was a great ensemble cast with highly trained and veteran actors and actresses. I think it was a difficult play to pull off and everyone was extremely capable in their role.

Literature was also woven through the play. The first reference was Thomas Hardy, who of course thought about marriage a lot. But, it jumped through literary history nimbly and lightly with allusions and quotes here and there. It was a reprieve and read like an English paper, but for those who read will provide some nice comic relief.

I liked this and would definitely recommend it. It's good for theater lovers (might not be great introductory stuff), English teachers and maybe might substitute for marriage counseling this week.