Marvin’s Room at Old Library Theatre

Marvin’s Room takes its title from the space family patriarch Marvin Wakefield spends all the hours of his days, now that he’s reached the end stages of his life’s journey. He and his sister Ruth are tended to by his eldest daughter, Bessie. They’re the unchosen family who chose to remain together. In Ohio, Marvin’s youngest daughter, Lee, is struggling to raise two teenage sons alone - Charlie, a bookworm who’s failing out of school, and Hank, current resident of a detention facility, put there after attempting to burn down the family home. When Bessie is diagnosed with leukemia, she and Lee are forced to reconnect. Might Lee or one of her sons be a match for Bessie’s needed bone marrow transplant? What’s to become of Marvin and Ruth if not? While its themes are tinged with sadness, Marvin’s Room is laugh-out-loud funny and oh-so-wise about how each of us persists - in families we didn’t choose, in bodies that betray us, in lives we don’t recognize, and in the face of each of life’s little and not-so-little indignities and disappointments?