By Michael H. Margolin
Somewhere in the middle of Act II, Emily (Rhiannon Ragland) says to her husband, David (Bill Simmons), "I feel that I've forgotten how to have a normal conversation. We used to be interesting." And so, playwright Carey Crim puts her foot in her mouth.
"Some Couples May…" – which opened at The Purple Rose Theatre April 1 – begins as a comic exploration of a couple's infertility, and by Act II, we have a dominatrix who practices above a pediatrician's office, a patriarch with cancer and the couple themselves who, in Act I, used to be interesting.
Now, that two such charming actors as Simmons and Ragland should be uninteresting is impossible. Bringing to their character qualities of performance that belie the level to which the characters have descended in their obsessive pursuit of conception, Crim owes a great debt to the actors and the director, Guy Sanville.
Take Ragland's Emily, who is an OCD personality type given to dramatic hysteria, by turns funny, exasperating, and sometimes a bit annoying. But she does it so well that we forgive her and nearly love her, if, for nothing else, the way she dips her beautiful pony tail onto the coffee table as a gesture of hopelessness and frustration.
The line that is not included, but which might come from Simmon's mouth as the long-suffering pediatrician husband, is "Take my wife. Please." But Simmons makes us believe that David is one of the nicest people on the face of the earth and a counterweight to his self-involved wife. Though, one might ask why is he so untutored about the ways of fertility testing. Sure, it is not his specialty, but I think he would have more expertise, and wouldn't he at least dab a bit of alcohol before giving a shot? Just asking.
Still, pleasures abound both in Act I with its funny one-liners and the abrupt changes of pitch and emotion from Emily, leaving one wondering, "How does she do that?"
Act I also gives us a chance to meet David's family: his brother, the bartender, Henry (Alex Leydenfrost), and his very fertile wife Faye (Michelle Mountain), pregnant with her fourth; his mother, Lois (Jan Radcliff) who puts her foot in everyone else's mouth without a bit of self-awareness, and the patriarch of the family, Bernie (Jim Porterfield), who can get a laugh out of a syllable, let alone the few he is given, invariable laugh-out-loud ones.
By Act II, a pall has fallen. And though the laughs persist, there is a shadow, not only because Crim is repeating herself with the obsessive baby-fertility-pressured-husband-overeager-wife routine, but because the play will shift as we hear a confession that is not foreshadowed and a shadow lengthens into mortality. I would like to report that this departure balances the impended arrival of a new life, but the play's end is teasingly unresolved.
In a setting and set labeled "an affluent suburb of Detroit," normally dexterous designer Vincent Mountain would have us satisfied with a somewhat plain leather couch, a couple of tables that would be painted or made into plant stands on any number of HGTV shows, and a large chair you might see behind an accountant's desk, where it should stay. We are expected to imagine a couple of doctors' offices, a dominatrix's apartment, (played by the fetching Aphrodite Nikolovski), a hospital waiting room – but I was still hung up on "affluent." Christianne Myers' costumes are fine as far as they go – Henry the bartender gets two t-shirts while his brother, the pediatrician, frumps around in the same outfit for two acts and six or so months – and it looks below the level of white collar let alone affluent.
So, in the end, what has Purple Rose fetched up? Some good laughs, a hell of a lot of internet research about fertility, and actors who rise above the level given to them by the playwright. In all, more than a pleasant evening of entertainment with a few ideas thrown in to make it teasingly intellectual – and two quite extraordinary scenes, one involving a husband's attempts to get it up in a fertility doctor's office when the DVD is broken, and the other, the domination of a man by a young woman in thigh-high red boots.
REVIEW:
'Some Couples May…'
The Purple Rose Theatre Company, 137 Park St., Chelsea. Wednesday-Sunday through May 28; no performance Easter Sunday. $25-$40. 734-433-7673. http://www.purplerosetheatre.org.
