MAREK’S MONKEY
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Sarah Hughes can’t adjust to the fact that she is getting older and that her husband, once a highly respected doctor, is dead. Her daughter, Margot, a grown woman in her 30s, is still rebelling against her upper-class upbringing by choosing a less honorable career than medicine–she’s a modeling agent–and by becoming sexually involved with “working men” who are two or three octaves lower on the social scale than her father was. Pilk, an 18-year-old homeless product of the working class, has run away from her sexually abusive stepfather, and lives illegally in the laundry room of the Gold Coast apartment building where the play is set. Tad Marek has a score of problems befitting the main character of a serious drama. A Polish immigrant, the 36-year-old Marek was an honored physician before he ran afoul of Polish authorities and was forced to give up his practice and eventually to leave his homeland. In America his plans to resume his practice are frustrated when he discovers that he cannot practice medicine unless he gets a residency at an American hospital, and then that he cannot get a residency in his chosen subspecialty, hematology, but only in one he never respected, anesthesiology. “I will not pass gas,” he complains with uncharacteristic indelicacy and bitterness. So he toils as a janitor and handyman in the apartment building.
Of course the lives of these four characters become entangled. Margot lusts after Marek, until she discovers in midseduction that he is not a true “working man.” He may have the trim, fit, muscular body of a janitor, but he has a physician’s brain–just like her father. This proves too much of a turnoff for Margot, and she turns her attentions to Carlos the doorman. Sarah too has plans for Marek. From the moment she discovers he is a doctor, she tries to maneuver him into a residency at her husband’s old hospital.
If only the other relationships in the story had come off as smoothly, Marek’s Monkey would have been an unqualified success. As it is, Marek’s Monkey is well-crafted and worth seeing, but hardly worth going out of your way to see.
