CRAZY MARY, a play by A. R. Gurney

It can be suspected that A. R. Gurney wrote Crazy Mary years ago and recently pulled it out of a drawer from under a pile of scripts that never got produced and finally did get it produced after he updated it with some humorous lines about President George W. Bush. That may not be true but the story line dates back to those days when the Pulitzer Prize winning Harvey by Mary Chase was a must-see on Broadway - that was in the 1940s. So Crazy Mary is a light comedy that can comfortably while away your time some afternoon when you have nothing to do.

There is nothing wrong with Crazy Mary playing at Playwrights Horizons except that the characters are stereotypical and the plot is somewhat unbelievable and predictable after the first 20 minutes. A controlling, domineering mother who needs money and her Harvard son visit their second cousin, "crazy" Mary, whom they haven’t seen in years in a private psychiatric institution in Boston. The mother’s secret motive is to gain control of Mary’s fortune. After some twists the son responds to crazy Mary’s awakening deep yearning for love, even though she used to be his mother’s best friend and probably 25 years older than him. The uptight Bostonian mother is shocked. And it goes on. It turns out exactly as you would imagine; the tragedy that occurs does not really surprise and the mother’s growth that comes out of it does not surprise, and satisfaction comes at the end. You will laugh at some of the lines, especially those about George Bush.

The acting is uniformly excellent, the direction good, the set tremendous. Actors include Sigourney Weaver, Kristine Nielsen, Myra Lucretia Taylor, Michael Esper, and Mitchell Greenberg. Jim Simpson is director.

THE ROMANCE OF MAGNO RUBIO, a play by Lonnie Carter, based on short story by Carlos Bulosan

The Romance of Magno Rubio at The Culture Project in New York City is the kind of drama that you always wish to see in theatre but almost never do – beautiful ensemble work, brilliant direction, an uplifting script that keeps you enchanted and surprised moment to moment in a story that could easily depress were it not that its heartbreaking social message is surpassed by its inspiring spirit of humanity and its unmatched, hopeful idealism. An Obie winner, it is being presented by the Ma-Yi Theater Company.

Reviewers have called the story a folk tale or a fable, and it is as well a metaphor for the betrayal of the American Dream. Magno Rubio is a 4 foot 6 inch Fillipino, a migrant farm laborer, picking beans, asparagus, citrus fruits, moving around the country with the crops as the seasons change. In his loneliness and grim life, he answers a lonely hearts ad in a magazine and launches a correspondence with Clarabelle, a blond 6 foot woman from Arkansas. She, promising to marry him, requests money for her sick mother, her brothers and sisters, and other interminable needs. Over years he complies with cash and gifts. His bunkmates make fun of him, and emphasize the impossibility of his fantasy; nevertheless he preservers, holding firm in his dream of marriage and true love. As the years pass, his co-workers have to come to admire him for his steadfast faith and never-wavering idealism. When the awful day of truth arrives he is overcome and despondent only for a moment, then rationalizes that his actions have after all enriched, have supplied not only himself but his fellow workers with the energy and hope that day to day filled a powerful hunger and need.

Interwoven into the story are vibrant exciting Filipino musical rhythms pounded out with bamboo sticks, guitar, mandolin, as well as verse, all of which brings about a spiritual sense of bonding and healing. It is so rare when all elements of a production come together to make a glorious unified whole. Loy Arcenas directs; Jojo Gonzales plays Magno Rubio. Bunkmates are played by Arthur T. Acuna, Bernardo Bernardo, Ramon De Ocampo, and Polo Montalban.

Carlos Bulosan, the author of the short story on which the drama is based, was short and brown as a coconut like Magno Rubio, a migrant who belonged to the first generation of 100,000 Filipino laborers whom American businessmen recruited in the 1920s and 1930s to work in the plantations of Hawaii, the Alaskan canneries and the farmlands of the West Coast. Always on the move, working long hours, subjected to racism and discrimination, he deeply understood the qualms of homesickness and the yearning for love and affection. As a youth he educated himself, spending hours in libraries, learning English and reading stories. In time he tried writing his own stories, sending them to magazines that always returned them, until finally he sent one to a magazine he’d never heard of – The New Yorker. This time a letter came back instead of his story. They would publish it. And they asked for more. From there he built his reputation as a writer of immigrant issues. During the McCarthy era he was blacklisted for exposing American inequities. He died in 1956.