'Marrying Terry' An Appealing, Romantic Fairy Tale Romp

The reputation of the Victory Gardens Greenhouse as in incubator of first-rate new American plays was enhanced Wednesday night, December 19, as the Nightingale Group presented the world professional premiere of the comedy Marrying Terry, enchanting an opening night audience of reviewers and well-wishers.  The play, by Chicago-based composer and lyricist turned playwright Gregg Opelka, has been workshopped at the Greenhouse for the last two years and had a stage premiere in Chesterton, Indiana's 4th Street Theater last May, but it is definitely ready for the big time now, and ultimately may even play stronger as a Hollywood movie than it does as a stage play.

Not to take anything away from the play as a theater piece—not at all.  But the idea of seeing Jennifer Aniston and Patrick Dempsey (or their younger doppelgangers) in the lead roles bounced through my head repeatedly, and it will be a joy to watch other theaters take up this delightful script and make it a familiar name to audiences until such a studio deal takes place.  I can imagine that it will have a long life in amateur and college theaters as well, with its modest-sized cast and truly delightful premise.

The idea behind Marrying Terry is the amusing notion that a man and a woman, both named "Terry Adams," wind up in the Presidential Suite at Chicago's Drake Hotel on a blizzardy New Year's Eve, and that both are getting engaged (to other people, naturally) on that same night.  What sets the script apart from other plays you may know is that it seems equal parts light romantic comedy and sex farce, which until Wednesday night I didn't know was possible.

To achieve this, playwright Opelka and director Suzanne Avery-Thompson have crafted an ingenious series of coincidences and mistaken identities, peppered throughout with not only very funny one-liners but with a fairy tale touch and a wistful, soft mood.  Indeed, it's the only New Year's Eve comedy you will ever see without a single streamer, noisemaker or balloon in evidence.  There is only booze—a lot of it!—and discussions of romantic notions, life plans and the suitability of two people for each other, whether or not they realize it at the same moment.

The male and female Terry Adamses (Dan Rodden and Ana Sferruzza, respectively) are getting engaged to Penny (Mary Mulligan) and Jonathon (Paul Perroni), both of whom are stronger personalities than the sensitive duo in question.  And they each bring a friend into the mix as well (Brian Simmons as Sam, and Debbie Laumand-Blanc as Janet).  Four of these six 30-something characters inhabit the world of Chicago's well-to-do yuppie Gold Coast/Lincoln Park area, and two are out-of-towners (a lawyer and a District Attorney).  They mix and match in a lobby bar and the expensive Suite at the Drake (which should get itself all ready for the above-mentioned movie deal), get confused about who is who and who loves who and why, who knows what and when—you get the idea.  But the farcical elements (deftly laid out to the extent that I was worried they weren't more typical and rote and formulaic—why did I worry?) are balanced with quotations from "Ode to a Nightingale" by the English Romantic poet John Keats.  I doubt any other farce does that.  No other farce or comedy so deftly combines the first two acts of the traditional three-act Kaufman and Hart play formula into one, thereby ridding theater companies of that 21st century no-no, two intermissions.  And no other romantic comedy's final scene begins with a group of characters all calling out each other's names, trying it again, and yet again, with the audience admiring the mathematical stability of it all despite the relatively small number of doors in the set (designed by Kevin C. Doler).

There were a few slips of the tongue in evidence on opening night, but these will smooth away early in the production's six week run.  Other than the inexplicable (though funny) fact that a Lincoln Park yuppie has never heard of the 151 bus, the only incongruous element in the whole show is the fact that there is an invisible wall which runs parallel to the edge of the stage, rather than perpendicular to it.  By itself that is only odd (not impossible, but odd); however, upon reflection I couldn't come up with a reason that the show was staged that way.  It is entirely plausible to come into a room and not see a bed, merely because you are looking somewhere else.  There doesn't have to be an imaginary wall there, as far as I can tell.

But this is minor nonsense.  The script is a wonderful construct and deserves life in many different guises.  The physical production (costumes by Julie Aubry, lighting by Mary McDonald Badger) is lovely.  The performers are for the most part delightful, real people caught up in circumstances they can't figure out.  These characters just want to create their own happiness, happiness that feels right, and in the best tradition of both romantic comedy and farce, they do, brought to life by a troupe of seasoned and attractive performers.  I have to say that the lead Terrys are in danger of being upstaged by the outstanding romantic character work of the four secondary leads, as well as that of the veteran Ronald Keaton as a surgeon and plot enabler.  And yet, the handsome, bewildered gentleness of Rodden and the resilient, unusual loveliness of Sferruzza do shine through in the end.  (In early scenes, Sferruzza and Lauman-Blanc are in danger of resembling Kristen Davis and Cynthia Nixon in "Sex and the City," and Mulligan bears an eerie resemblance to Debra Monk in Curtains until morphing into both Patsy and Edina from "Absolutely Fabulous!")

But the show and this production are really clever and fun, a great winter escape for those who like their comedies, and their New Year's Eves, to be unexpectedly rich and intimate and exasperating and rewarding.  If you like your farces to build slowly and steadily, so that you have time to ponder the awful next stage of the game before it deliciously unfolds, you will also find this play a delightful way to pass a cold evening.  Don't wait for the movie, go see Marrying Terry now, and you can tell your friends you saw it before TV's "friends" made it into a starring-vehicle Christmas-date-movie benefiting the careers of the whole lot of them.  You heard it here first!

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