Theater: 'Bette' Noir

Henri Bergson, the French philosopher and author of a famous tract on laughter, once observed: “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” If this is so, the mind of playwright Christopher Durang is prepared to the point of absurdity. For beyond the ridiculousness in his autobiographical 1985 play, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, currently being revived by the Roundabout Theatre Company, there’s unrelieved savagery. This tale of two clans linked by the titular pair’s long, woebegone marriage contains virtually no character able to see reality as it is, as opposed to the reality they pray for.

The primary example is Bette (Kate Jennings Grant), who pushes four stillborn babies out of her womb yet never articulates why conceiving child after child is so essential to her. The closest she comes is when she phones an old pal from her youth to catch up or admits to adoring the animal characters of A.A. Milne.

No doubt Bette’s unsuccessful pregnancies—each end with a dour obstetrician (Terry Beaver) hurling them to the floor—is why husband Boo (Christopher Evan Welch) is an alcoholic. But Boo was damaged goods when he married her: He was the product of a rancid, misogynistic father, symbolically named Kurt (John Glover), and a breathtakingly dim-bulb mother, the aptly named Soot (Julie Hagerty).

Matt (Charles Socarides), Bette and Boo’s only child to reach maturity, narrates the play and acts as a guide through its jumbled chronology. He steps in and out of David Korins’ crimson setting, with its sliding panels and Donald Holder’s curiously harsh lighting endowing the atmosphere with a vaudevillian tint.

Or maybe the right word is “circus,” for there’s also Bette’s sister Emily (Heather Burns), whose worship of Catholicism illustrates one type of self-delusion, and second sister Joan (Zoë Lister-Jones), a perpetually pregnant sourpuss whose withering putdowns exhibit another. Bette’s mother Margaret (Victoria Clark) is dolled up in costumes by Susan Hilferty that pay tribute to Mamie Eisenhower, while Bette’s father Paul (Adam Lefevre) speaks unintelligibly and dies in the middle of a scene. Naturally, Bette’s brethren cover him up with a sheet and matter-of-factly go on.

All this would be grisly if it were not so laugh-out-loud funny. Instinctually, Clark projects a sense that Margaret really knows how dreary everyone’s situation is, be it Bette’s pregnancy obsession or desiccating marriage. When a gravy boat is accidentally knocked to the floor at a family Thanksgiving—and Boo, ever blotto, fails to clean it up correctly—Bette’s anger, at last unleashed, hardly makes Clark’s Margaret blink. Instead, she floats away on a vaporous cloud of cheeriness, everyone else in tow. Hagerty’s feather-light, delightfully daffy voice makes her seem otherworldly, and allows Glover’s sneers to chill the spine.

It’s ironic that Bette and Boo, despite what occurs to them over 33 scenes, are ultimately underwritten. You can almost see Grand and Welch work overtime to fill in the emotional voids—especially Welch, who achieves a balance between bathos and believability. Clearly, Bette and Boo are of great emotional import to Durang, but his eye can be cruel: Having set things up so their only hope for happiness is to listen to the counseling of Father Donnally (Beaver, doing double duty), they discover that the priest’s greatest talent is delivering unspoken truths and doing an imitation of frying bacon.

In the role Durang originated, Socarides, a fine and sturdy actor, appears advised by director Walter Bobbie to assume that the events of the play are almost none of his business. There’s risk to this strategy, for Matt is part of the story—the golden boy given to discussing Thomas Hardy novels and his Ivy League schoolwork—yet removed from it, a dispassionate observer in the tradition of The Glass Menagerie’s tart-tongued Tom. It’s not easy to be segregated from all the goofiness and whimsy and fun. But perhaps that’s how Durang saw himself when he wrote the play. Or maybe that’s as much as he dared comprehend at the time.

Through Sept. 7. Laura Pels Theatre, 111 W. 46th St. (at 6th Ave.), 212-719-1300; $63.75-73.75