Review: Agree or Disagree, Mrs. Murray’s Menagerie Keeps Us at a Distance

The play’s always-at-arm’s-length subtext makes it hard for us to appreciate or connect with the material on an emotional level.

Mrs. Murray's Menagerie
Photo: Ben Arons Photography

Six parents of varying demographics take part in a focus group. It’s 1979 and they’re there to answer questions about a popular children’s television show, Mrs. Murray’s Menagerie. The play, the mastermind of the Mad Ones theater company, shares the same title as this much-discussed show within a show, but the lessons taught to its adult audience are much less obvious, so much so that they’re likely to be missed entirely. The structural choice of following a focus group largely in real time limits the emotional range of the production, distilling too much to the instructions given to the focus group: “Thumbs up is agree, thumbs down is disagree; thumb to the middle is neutral, somewhat agree.”

Dale (Brad Heberlee), of the data-collecting company Blue Horizon, is an anodyne presence. His intentionally bland moderation makes for a problematic focal point for the play, since his task is to avoid conflict. In this way, he serves to turn moments that would make for entertaining drama into dry data. His lightning-fast questioning dredges up only the most superficial of responses, a process so dull that the production plays it for laughs, with Dale’s assistant Jim (Marc Bovino), always struggling to keep up as he hastily transcribes all of the notes onto a chalkboard. Dale’s not interested in these people, and only slightly more so in their answers, as shown by the way he parrots things back with queries that aim to get everyone on the same, easily digestible page: “Can you distill that down to one word?”

Mrs. Murray’s Menagerie succeeds only by showing the struggle against such reduction: the subtle ways in which these parents, sometimes with only the choice of a single word, manage to maintain their humanity in the face of such aggressive neutrality. We learn a lot about June (Carmen M. Herlihy) not by her negative gut-response to a mouse puppet, but by the way in she psychoanalytically draws a distinction between the speaking and non-speaking puppets on the children’s program. Elsewhere, the hardscrabble divorcee Gloria (Stephanie Wright Thompson) is fleshed out less by what she says than by the way in which she’s desperately trying to impress and emulate her more successful female counterpoint, Cici (January LaVoy).

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Ernest (Phillip James Brannon) is perhaps too straightforward, serving as the play’s conscience, but at least his refusal to bend on certain moral issues is rooted in a real sense of him as a father. Blue-collar Wayne (Michael Dalto) is particularly fascinating: When he describes a character on the unseen show within the show as “soft,” he’s being inadvertently homophobic, and yet when he’s called out on it, he’s also the most sincerely apologetic.

It’s in the slight pauses and earnest fumbles that these characters show themselves to be exceedingly human. This is an interesting, albeit subtle and attention-demanding conceit, because if you blink then you’ll miss what’s really going on beneath the surface. But it’s not always theatrically effective. Lila Neugebauer’s direction and You-Shin Chen and Laura Jellinek’s set can’t help but partially obscure some of the cast; they’re sitting at a round table, which inevitably leaves their backs to some of the audience.

It’s easy to respect Mrs. Murray’s Menagerie on an intellectual level, but its always-at-arm’s-length subtext makes it hard for us to appreciate or connect with the material on an emotional level. The drama exists in a negative space, by dint of what doesn’t happen in this focus group, a too-clever reflection of the group’s pivotal discussion around the role of consequences in a children’s television show. You can appreciate the play’s period-specific craft, the accuracy of Asta Bennie Hostetter’s costuming, or the precise rhythms of an ensemble-penned script that brings to mind the hyperrealism of Annie Baker, but it’s at a distance.

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The play’s most direct arc is the most relatable. Roger (Joe Curnutte), one of the six parents, at first appears to be a fairly decent guy—so long as he’s being heard. Over time, as focus shifts to the others, he relaxes his genial salesman façade, revealing the smug and fragile man underneath. When he’s lightly ribbed for his disagreeability, he unleashes the entitled asshole lurking beneath that smile. For a while, he parrots Gloria, antagonizing her in plain sight; later, he goes a step further and places his hand on Cici’s leg as he makes sexual insinuations about her. He’s got a transformative arc, one that’s intentionally left incomplete, given that he faces no consequences for his actions. (Difficult, too, not to read into Dale’s humoring of Roger’s bad behavior as Trump-like: “I want to take a minute to reiterate that both of your opinions—both of your viewpoints—are valid and absolutely essential for our discussion.”)

This is another instance of the way in which the play uses negative space, and a marked delineation between the fairytale children’s programming that’s being discussed, and the grownup reality these participants are living in. But does having a solid thesis protect against narrative bloat or the subdued emotions? You are left to decide: Agree, disagree, maybe.

Mrs. Murray’s Menagerie is now playing at Ars Nova at Greenwich House.

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Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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