Magical Realism as Deus ex Machina at Lincoln Center

I've mentioned or  written about "How to Transcend a Happy Marriage," a current play by Sarah Ruhl, in a couple of previous posts, which you can find here and here.  But I want to touch on one more aspect of the piece before moving on.

When Greek playwrights spun out complicated and seemingly unresolvable plots, they would sometimes call upon divine intervention to sort things out. A god would be typically lowered onto the stage  from somewhere above (deus ex machine) and employing super-human powers, bring about a happy ending.





Ruhl uses a form of magical realism to the same end, and what you think of her play may depend on what you think of that technique.  The playwright might argue that it allows her to go places and deal with issues or ideas that she otherwise couldn't. Others might argue it is simply an easy out.

Without giving too much away, a key character in the play -- someone who has in effect prompted a situation that appears very difficult to successfully resolve -- turns into a bird, which naturally has the effect of causing one to wonder whether that person ever existed at all.  The characters in the play do eat what are depicted as powerful hash brownies early on and that could explain the situation at least in part.

I was personally left somewhat dissatisfied by Ruhl's employment of the device. While it was, on one hand, a surprising twist in the plot that got me wondering what would come next -- and wondering if what I had seen in the first act had actually occurred -- I felt that at the same time Ruhl didn't know how to deal with her own creation.

Having set her characters on course for what appeared to be a domestic tragedy likely to unleash deep-seated emotions that would test marriage, friendship and parenting to the core, the play instead resolved into a saccharine, feel-good comedy thanks to magic.

Having just emerged from previews at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, the New York Times reviewed the play yesterday.

"The elements never quite coalesce into a single fluid stream of thought or story," was the bottom line.