Cardinal School Lahore
MARRIAGE isn’t a bed of roses for housewife Bette and
her alcoholic
husband Boo, it’s more like a bed of nails. Surrounded
by their neurotic, deeply disturbed parents, they desperately
attempt to cope, raising their son to new heights of
confusion. A searing dissection of marriage and family
life, The marriage of Bette and Boo is the failure to
communicate taken to its most disturbing extremes.
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The
author essentially walks us through his play in the
transparent guise of Bette and Boo’s son Matt, who functions
as narrator. From the start, Matt stands apart, shifting
through the lives of the parents and their families
in an attempt to discern why they went so wretchedly
wrong. Although he never achieves a clear understanding,
he finds the compassion he needs to begin to forgive.
Bette hopes that parenthood will bring them closer together,
but it doesn’t. Boo, like his father, seeks escape in
the bottle. Like her mother, Bette expects that a large
family will make her happy. After Matt, however, she
births only corpses, four stillborns in monotonous succession.
Bette nags, Boo drinks; Boo drinks, bette nags. In its
outline, the story is sadly familiar; it’s the quirky
particulars that make it both riotously funny and wrenchingly
sad. Christopher Durang is one of America’s most controversial
playwrights, noted for his dark satirical humor and
his open assault on traditional social structures and
belief systems. The Marriage of Bette & Boo outlines
another one of these problems.
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