'Life in a Marital Institution': A screechy monologue about family woes
A critic's nightmare: I can't think of a single good thing to say about this show. Not the content, not the delivery, not anything. Life in a Marital Institution (20 years of monogamy in one terrifying hour) is an apparently autobiographical monologue, written and performed by James Braly and directed by Hal Brooks.
A critic's nightmare: I can't think of a single good thing to say about this show. Not the content, not the delivery, not anything.
Life in a Marital Institution
(20 years of monogamy in one terrifying hour)
is an apparently autobiographical monologue, written and performed by James Braly and directed by Hal Brooks.
The thing about a show-length monologue is that you have to find the monologuist sympathetic or interesting or insightful. You have to be amused or charmed or intrigued. Braly, with his screechy voice and his constant laughing at his own jokes and his self-aggrandizing sexist mockery is the kind of guy who can wreck a dinner party or make you get off a train before your stop.
He begins in a hospice where his sister is dying of cancer; Braly, her devoted brother, sits by her side, declaring his love. His sister asks, "Do you love me enough to trade places with me?" Stymied for a moment, Braly asks, "Would you want to be married to Susan?" She'd rather die, she replies. After what we hear about Susan in the next 60 or 70 minutes, we see her point.
Meanwhile - the monologue cuts back and forth between the hospice and Braly's marriage - the sister wants to marry her latest boyfriend before she goes. This means that we get a glimpse into the rest of his big family. All of them are mean and crazy.
Braly's stories of his life in his "marital institution" are all about his neurotic, hippie-dippie wife who still breast-feeds their sons (ages 6 and 4), who finds marriage counselors through witches, and who, at their first meeting, snatched his notebook from him to correct the poem he was writing.
What these stories reveal - there are endless accounts of placenta-eating as well as of his adolescent attraction to a French woman - is that not only is Susan weird, but that he, as her very weird husband, is too feeble to do anything other than what she insists on. We are to believe that he is helplessly, pathologically in love.
The show has played in New York and is now on a national tour. That Braly has been able to make a career out of parading these cruelties onstage is almost as sad as their life together sounds.
Life in a Marital Institution
Through July 16 at the Wilma Theater, Broad and Spruce Streets. Tickets: $35. Information: 215-546-7824 or wilmatheater.org.EndText