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Ha! Yes, we're alluding to The Dying Gaul in the post title. Probably just a knee-jerk reaction to death and dying, trying to distance ourselves with irony.
Last night was opening night of Tuesdays with Morrie, which plays at the Rep through May 7. Tickets are here. Under 25 gets you in for just $10; adults pay $15 to $40.
Having read the book (seven years on the New York Times Bestseller List), we were not in a hurry to rush out and see a stage strewn with life-affirming aphorisms, but as the reviews attest, the play is not the book (or the movie).
For those of you unwilling to submit to the cultural hegemony of bestseller lists, the story is told by Mitch Albom, a real-life on-the-go sportswriter who, with the help of an ex-professor, gets his groove back. Mitch is an insufferable prick, see, all about his career, but one night he sees his old mentor, sociology professor Morrie Schwartz, on TV and learns he's dying of ALS. After a one-time visit turns into two or three, Mitch soon spends every Tuesday with Morrie "learning about life, love, community, work, family, forgiveness, and the meaning of death."
The astonishing thing is how well it works even if you do know exactly what's coming: you'll laugh out loud, you'll tear up. Seattlest is not a big crier, it's not really our thing, but for a good half of the 90-minute play we could feel the itchy, burning sensation of our tear ducts firing up. (The Rep really ought to hand out those travel packs of tissue for people heading in, because there was a nontrivial amount of snuffling and gurgling going on all around us.) Alvin Epstein as Morrie is marvelous to watch, effortlessly exuding warmth and wisdom, and tremendously affecting in his decline.
More good stuff: aside from an opening that seemed to come from the intro to the "Mitch & Morrie Show," director Esbjornson manages to weave a multitude of scenes-from-live into a message about how dying teaches us how to live. Though in one sense, the mentor/student relationship is universal, Esbjornson makes sure we're drawn into this particular dynamic. The initial meeting of Mitch and Morrie -- after leaving college, Mitch had let their friendship drop for 16 years -- is rich with awkwardness and a re-awakening familiarity.
In the play, there's more about Mitch and the death in his past (a favorite uncle who died early of pancreatic cancer) to balance Morrie and the death in his past (a mother who died when he was young). The emotional journeys of both are still less of a dramatic arc: Mitch is slowed down a bit from his helter-skelter pace, while Morrie is simply interested in going out teaching. So the drama isn't in either Mitch or Morrie, it's in the fact that death is about to pull them apart.
You'd think this would be a lugubrious evening, watching Morrie go out, but Epstein gives Morrie an indomitable flair -- when he isn't tossing out aphorisms on living the good life, he's delivering sly asides, or making fun of his own frequent crying jags.
Posoni's Mitch, in contrast, is the play's straight man, stiff and wooden in his comportment. Posoni had a tendency to say his lines like they were drawn with a ruler from A to B, with little variation. It may have been right for Mitch's brusque, all-business self, but it made Morrie much more interesting to listen to.
The set we found just wrong. It's sort of a parquet half-pipe, with set pieces (an end table, a recliner, a bed) that slide in and out -- the sliding is convenient for set changes (the actors remain onstage, in a spot), but since you see the furniture whisking here and there, the overall impression is of ultra-modern living. It ruins the gone-to-seed, well-loved interior of Morrie's house you want to have in your head.
Photo ©2006 Chris Bennion
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