STAGE WEST: "Another Marriage" at Steppenwolf Theatre

Caroline Neff and Ian Barford in "Another Marriage."                                        Photo by Michael Brosilow

        I’d always wanted to attend a performance at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, so, finding myself on vacation for a few days in the Windy City, I bought tickets to a Wednesday evening performance of Kate Arrington’s world-premiere dramedy “Another Marriage.”
        Arrington is an ensemble member at the Steppenwolf, and this staging of her first play is directed by another ensemble member, Terry Kinney.
        Alas, “Another Marriage” is a troubled, incomplete-feeling work that wallows in excess messaging and designed “significance” and is not helped by characters who almost to a person are patently unlikable.
           The opening scene is a promising meet-cute on Steppenwolf’s stage in the round between Nick (Ian Barford) and the ironically named Sunny (Judy Greer). She’s prone to exasperation and fond of f-bombs but is somehow disarmed by a persistent Nick, whose ultimate gesture of wooing her is taking off all his clothes, exposing a less than Adonis like form, before asking her on a date.
            I don’t think I expected nudity in the first 15 minutes of the play, but that’s fine. It grabs one’s attention, no question.
           The courtship of Sunny by Nick leads quickly (too quickly?) to married life and you just know that’s going to be fraught with pitfalls. Nick is a “serious writer” who has regular creative blocks will never be – he admits -- commercially successful. Sunny has deeply personal writing ambitions of her own but her frustration and preoccupation get in the way of her productivity.
          Watching a play about writers has always been laborious for me. They’re invariably portrayed as name-droppingly pretentious or “endearingly” neurotic and we never actually see them write because watching a character write is, well, boring.
           Nick and Sunny argue a lot and trade pungent observation about peers, academics and Henry James and even make a baby, Josephine, who is named for the mother who tragically lost her life upon giving birth to Sunny.
          The presence of the baby in the home only brings Nick down, and soon he’s at a cocktail table flirting with a literary agent’s assistant named Macassidy (Caroline Neff) who’s making a daffy attempt at seduction.
           Quick as a flirty wink, Nick leaves Sunny and baby Josie for Macassidy (bad name, by the way).
While all of this is going down in an over-long first act, the grown Josie, or Jo (Nicole Scimeca) stands or sits on the perimeter of the stage with her iPad, digitally monitoring these machinations and reminding the audience (on an overhead display panel) of passages of time or the thrust of each scene. It isn’t until Act 2 that Jo becomes a genuine character, and when she does she spends most of her time telling the audience her grandmother’s story as a means of “completing” the woman’s life in her own name.
         Nick, self-involved and in love with his own voice if not his own writing, is rarely ever a sympathetic figure even when he tries to do what he thinks “the right thing” is. Barford seems comfortable enough in this skin.
          Greer’s Sunny is a prodigious swearer (and later a sobber), refusing to play the victim but definitely acting like one.
           Neff’s Macassidy grows up and grows wiser in the second act, and when she discovers as Sunny did that Nick can’t be relied upon in a marriage for anything but interest in himself she emerges as “Another Marriage’s” one adult character to invest in.
           Arrington has over-reached with this script, trying to be literary and psychologically probing and cute (Josie has a pet snail) all at the same time; it’s unclear to me through whose eyes we’re seeing all the various interrelated conflicts. Sunny would seem to be that person, but her character is always getting in her own way, lost in a slow burn of love, anger and depression.
           It's telling that the audience does not know if or when to applaud at the end of the first act or at the end of the play itself. That was the case at least on the night I was there.
          The Steppenwolf staging is thoughtful enough, employing moody recorded music, depictions of text exchanges on the digital display and spare but useful props.
           I wanted to like this production as much as I liked the Lincoln Park theater itself. Didn’t happen. “Another Marriage” needs another rewrite.

“Another Marriage” runs through July 23 at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago.