Cornfessional

By T.E.Kalem

TAKEN IN MARRIAGE by Thomas Babe

Taken in Marriage is a garrulous, extended crying jag of a play. The characters engage in whiny monologues and duelogues that exhume the bleached skeletons of their embittered relationships.

The setting is a New Hampshire church hall. The occasion is a wedding rehearsal that never does take place. The bride-to-be is Annie (Kathleen Quinlan). She is accompanied by her Aunt Helen (Elizabeth Wilson), her older sister Andrea (Meryl Streep) and her mother Ruth (Nancy Marchand), an unresigned widow. (Colleen Dewhurst played Ruth for a few performances but withdrew because of a prior commitment.) A fifth woman distinctly jars this ostensibly patrician clan. Dixie Avalon (Dixie Carter) is a breezy, purse-swinging entertainer who has been hired by one of the absent menfolk to sing Oh Promise Me, apparently as a prank. Dixie clearly plans to get cash for her trash.

As the afternoon wears on, the clan bitches it up, a diatribe here, a confessional secret there, a bilious distillation from atrabilious people. Andrea hates Annie because Daddy loved her more. Five marriages have not appeased her sense of loss. Out of vengeance or whim she has carried on an affair with Annie's fiance. Callously neglected by her late husband, Ruth fervently argues that loyalty and fidelity are above price. Only Aunt Helen has shared untarnished love in a lesbian idyl with an aviatrix now long dead. It is an odd angle of vision that per mits Playwright Babe to present this as the sole satisfactory relationship.

A resistance to close human bonds is characteristic of the people in most of Babe's plays. They are intimate with each other only when they are locked in phys ical or verbal violence. In A Prayer for My Daughter, a police detective who could have prevented his daughter's suicide deliberately fails to do so by not answering her radio call for help. In Fathers and Sons, a mythic play about Wild Bill Hickok, neither friendship nor love escapes the carnage. In Babe's Civil War play Rebel Women, General Sherman says, "I have no passion for war." The plausibility gap in Babe's plays is that almost nothing arouses his characters' passions.

A superb cast lends Taken in Marriage a trace of conviction. There is an aching honesty to Quinlan's Annie as she tries to hold a mirror up to her troubled heart. Streep's alabaster features can convey icy disdain and mock merriment. Her voice is a bed of nails on which she some times lies in self-contempt. As Ruth, Dewhurst was a Rock of Gibraltar. Marchand is better suited to the role, a homebody with artistic impulses who needs a hus band for ballast. Though she has her cranky moments, Wilson's Aunt Helen is a lamp of sanity, and if anyone could lift the evening out of the dumps, trust Carter's resilient Dixie. The pity is that these five remarkable actresses have been taken in miscarriage.

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