Mary Page Marlowe is an accountant from Ohio. She's led an ordinary life, making the difficult decisions we all face as we try to figure out who we really are and what we really want. As Tracy Letts brings us moments-both pivotal and mundane-from Mary's life, a portrait of a surprisingly complicated woman emerges. Intimate and moving, Mary Page Marlowe shows us how circumstance, impulse and time can combine to make us mysteries...even to ourselves.
These snapshots are not always flattering or happy, and much is left unsaid and unexplored. Perhaps she went to prison for drink-driving and it’s hinted that she had an abortion in college. Letts presents pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that make up Mary’s life, not the whole picture. This disjointed approach can be challenging as Letts offers up a whisper of truth, then sometimes snatches it away. But many will recognise how memories are often fragmented and that we rarely know the full story of someone’s life.
A formidable army of female talent has gone into the Old Vic's staging of Mary Page Marlowe, a 2016 play by American writer Tracy Letts (August: Osage County) that's very loosely inspired by his late mother's life story. This enigmatic, hard drinking woman is played by no fewer than five actors, including both Andrea Riseborough (who brilliantly embodied another alcoholic in the 2022 film To Leslie) and a 79-year-old Susan Sarandon making her belated London stage debut. To be a woman is to play a part, we're told. And if all these bodies somehow fail to fit together into a single living, breathing portrait of an actual person, each still brings some brilliance of its own to this fractured story.
| 2016 | Chicago |
Steppenwolf Original Production Chicago |
| 2018 | Off-Broadway |
Second Stage Theater New York Premiere Off-Broadway |
| 2025 | West End |
West End |
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