Magic sends tingles through Chafee’s Body
"Once you start to ask," Eleanor says, "there are more questions than answers." Not a surprising statement in a play whose title, Why We Have a Body promises an answer to an implied question. And as Eleanor warns us, once those questions start forming, the answers, they keep multiplying.
Claire Chafee's wonderfully enigmatic play is back at the Magic Theatre to open its 45th anniversary season with a look backward before heading into a season of newer plays. Body is being called a "legacy revival" because it was a huge hit for the Magic in 1993, running for six months and winning a passel of awards. What a welcome return it is.
In the nearly two decades since the play's premiere, it has lost nothing in its sense of humor, sense of mystery and sense of, well, sensuality.
Chafee's is an intellectual world – people living in their heads, in their pasts (the phrase "when I was a child" crops up a lot), in a perpetual state of perplexity – but that world is sliced through by a sharp comedy derived from family fractures and psychological scars.
A Magic proposal (in verse no less!)
This is one of the best stories to come out of a theater in many a moon.
Last week, after a performance of Liz Duffy Adams' Or, actress Maggie Mason was proposed to by her longtime boyfriend Matt Trainer. Maggie's co-stars, Natacha Roi and Ben Huber beat a hasty retreat after the curtain call and left Maggie alone on stage to be serenaded by Matt in verse he had written for the occasion.
Just watch the video and try not to tear up.