Playwright Donald Marguiles has an uncanny gift for interpreting the quirks, foibles, failures and charms of flawed humans – which is to say all people – and their interactions with one another. He was three times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and won the prestigious award in 2000 for his play Dinner with Friends.
It’s no secret that he has an affinity for Thornton Wilder, whose own Pulitzer Prize-winning play Our Town inspired Margulies’ latest work Lunar Eclipse. Our Town is clearly the superior drama but both plays provide much wisdom about the eternal quest to find meaning in life as age forces reflection and regret. And while Lunar Eclipse doesn’t measure up to the classic that inspires it, the 2nd Stage production at the Signature Center is blessed with a pair of veteran actors who elevate Margulies’ 85 minute two-hander to a sublime character study.
In his homage to Our Town, Margulies named his two characters George (Reed Birney) and Em (Lisa Emery), the same names as Wilder’s youthful protagonists – George and Emily. That’s the only obvious similarity but there are some deliberate parallels that seem forced.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Unlike their Our Town namesakes, George and Em are elderly and constantly bickering as old married couples tend to do. George is a farmer who’s spent his entire life stoically tending his western Kentucky fields, like his father and grandfather before him. He’s “gruff” as Em describes him, reticent and argumentative but he’s always been fascinated by the stars, and that’s why he’s come out to the field in the middle of the night to watch a lunar eclipse.
Margulies structured the play with scenes framed by the stages of the eclipse. We don’t see the actual phases of the moon but lighting designer Amith Chandrashaker along with video & projection designer S. Katy Tucker provide some beautiful imagery resembling the northern lights.
Each of the seven scenes is marked by technical descriptions: “Moon Enters Penumbra,” “Moon Enters Umbra” etc. projected overhead. I’m not quite sure it was needed, except that it gives the play a cosmic – almost otherworldly – sensibility. Later George matter-of-factly tells Em that he knows exactly when and how they both die. All of that struck me as a clunky nod to the surreal aspects of Our Town as Emily in that play dies, and then in death, is allowed to come back to Earth for a day.
There’s one other moment that seemed like a stretch. George describes to Em an early morning episode that terrified him as he was wide awake in the darkness sensing that “everything we’ve known, and thought was true…it was all a lie.” In a lengthy, highly emotional monologue, he exclaims “What if this time the forces of evil are here to stay? They won. Poisoned this land and everything that grows on it….” Some very strong ideas there but it seemed out of character for the pragmatic farmer. Perhaps it’s intended to recall Emily’s lament from Our Town when she cries out “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?” If that was Margulies’ aim, he missed the mark. The issues expressed in that intensely personal outburst were abruptly dropped and never revisited. It sounded more like the voice of the playwright rather than George.
Fortunately, these forced elements are the exception. As written and performed for the most part, the play is strongest when the characters are grounded in their own reality. On the surface, George and Em might bring to mind that American Gothic portrait of impassive farmers, but George especially, is a deceptively complex character who feels a lot more than he lets on. He loves his dogs perhaps more than his own son who died from a drug overdose. Em tries vainly to draw him out but he resists.
At its best, the production, incisively directed by Kate Whoriskey, is a moving and sometimes humorous portrait of two aging midwesterners staring their mortality in the face and re-assessing their lives together. Both have deep regrets and the more we learn about them, the more we can identify with their loss and introspection.
The final scene takes us back 50 years to when George and Em first met as high-school students. He invites her to watch a lunar eclipse from his father’s farm. They are young and innocent ”before time hardened them” as Em says. The actors’ instant transformation from old to young is fascinating. And it’s more proof that Birney and Emery are indispensable treasures of the theater.
It’s been reported that Reed Birney has been wanting to leave the theater for several years now and concentrate on film and television roles, but after reading Lunar Eclipse, he decided to make it his swan song. After yet another bravura display of his unparalleled talent, I can only hope that he reconsiders his stage retirement.
Lunar Eclipse opened June 3, 2025 at Signature Center and runs through June 22. Tickets and information: 2st.com
