ABINGDON SQUARE
Resembling a fusion of Anna Karenina, The School for Wives, and The War of the Roses, Fornes’s domestic potboiler is original only in form–intriguingly incomplete slivers of life that precisely trace this marriage’s unraveling. But Abingdon Square is more than an exercise in minimalist technique. Fornes’s snapshot style and her stiffly uncertain dialogue perfectly complement characters we see only from the outside, who hardly see themselves, let alone each other, and whose long speeches are transparent attempts to convince themselves they know what they feel. In Fornes’s modern melodrama, lovers always undermine their hopes; they feel their own needs so intensely that they can’t see that the beloved, the soul they think will always supply those needs, remains a stranger.
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This play could easily have dwindled into a feminist tract against lecherous old men acquiring naive young women through marriage. But Abingdon Square is never that polemical. Instead the play works subliminally, through wry touches, as in Juster’s unwitting arousal of Marion: helping Michael with his lessons, Juster describes the pollination of a flower. The play also works overtly: given the drawn-out repression of Marion’s sexual feelings, her awakening is inevitably violent. Yet no one’s egregiously to blame for the foundering of this marriage. For Juster it was natural to want to make her loveliness his own, and to think he could make her happy–it was wrong, but it was never evil.
Marjie Rynearson as Marion’s too-reticent aunt is equally helpless; as Marion’s cousin, Barb Prescott says all that’s necessary through her shocked silence. Playing yet another character who can’t follow through on his feelings, Kevin Theis as Frank is a Romeo afflicted with the curse of second thoughts.
