A crazed clan 2nd Story’s madcap Bette and Boo BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	The Marriage of Bette and Boo By Christopher Durang. Directed and designed by Ed Shea. With Rendueles Villalba, Lara Hakeem, Aaron Morris, Paula Faber, Jim Sullivan, Juli Parker, Peggy Becker, Mike Zola, Linda Kamajian, and J.M. Richardson. Costume design by Ron Cesario. Lighting design by Ron Allen. At 2nd Story Theatre through May 28.

Darkly satirical playwright Christopher Durang is to recovering Catholics what Richard Pryor is to former free-basers: evidence that there can be life and a sense of humor after, in this case, baptism.

Now 2nd Story Theatre is staging The Marriage of Bette and Boo, one of his comedies where a Roman Catholic upbringing takes a back seat to traumas closer to home. The author of Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All to You, it appears, could lead a Survivors of Parenthood group as well as a picket charge on Cardinal Law. The most autobiographical of his plays, Bette and Boo makes a normally lamented dysfunctional family look like a picnic with June and Ward Cleaver.

Durang gives us an alcoholic father, a mother obsessed with having another baby even though all but one have been stillborn, grandfathers who are either mean-mouthed or speech-impaired, grandmothers who are either a doormat or embittered, and aunts who include one who is excruciatingly uncomfortable unless she is apologizing.

Slouching against a wall, observing all of this with the dispassionate distance of memory is our narrator, Matt, played with the calm resignation of retrospection by Rendueles Villalba. If this sounds like Tom in The Glass Menagerie, that’s intentional, although the mother of Tennessee Williams’s stand-in didn’t insist on calling him Skippy, a character in her favorite TV show.

The absurdist tone of this carnival of events is set by an incident that happens several times: Bette is giving birth; a doctor steps into the waiting room, says, "The baby is dead," and lobs it (okay, a doll) into the midst of the family. Plunk. Bette whines, "I like children better than I like people." But she is Rh-negative, so in the 1950s the odds were against a successful delivery. Matt survived but four prospective siblings died.

Durang is not a cruel observer of these failed lives; he is more like someone staring slack-jawed at an endless series of train wrecks. He doesn’t flinch, no matter how crazed or appalling the behavior. Matt’s father’s father, Karl, is portrayed by Mike Zola with the matter-of-fact satisfaction of a poisonous snake who enjoys the biting more than the meal. About wives, he advises Matt: "Try to get them committed, if that amuses you, but don’t try to change them." Linda Kamajian gives his wife, Soot, the brain-rattled resilience of a Whack-a-Mole and the chirpy repressed anger of a future hubby-killer.

Director Ed Shea has cast everyone with pinpoint accuracy. Another example is Peggy Becker, who steals her every scene as Joan, Matt’s flustered aunt. Joan forgot the music when playing cello at her sister Bette’s wedding and is spending the rest of her life not forgiving herself; she pens more apologies than Johnny Damon signs baseballs. A hallmark of Shea’s directing is to have actors play it real and let the text and context take care of the funny. That pays off impressively when Jim Sullivan, as the speech-impaired grandpa Paul, raises a minor part to tragicomic dimensions. The character is totally unintelligible, but at one point he grows more and more pained as Matt tries to translate a string of gibbered sentences that become increasingly important to Paul.

Paula Faber and Juli Parker ably fill out roles as Bette’s mother and sister, respectively. J.M. Richardson, as usual, works hilarious wonders with a comical set piece in which his Father Donnally is addressing a retreat for married couples. (His heated annoyance that couples bring him problems the Church can’t solve is even funnier than the sight gag of him imitating sizzling bacon.)

And as for the title characters, Lara Hakeem and Aaron Morris inhabit them as though Bette and Boo were written for them. Bette chatters away incessantly, lest a thought slip in about how her blood is poison to her incipient babies. Boo is well-meaning — drunk, he tries to vacuum up gravy he spilled — but weak. He denies that he is an alcoholic like his father at all costs, even when the threat of divorce hovers.

Since we are in a memory play, a propless black-box production design is the way to go. Enhancing it is the lighting design by Ron Allen, with the theater-reminder of a footlight stage center. Whoever was on the light board when four characters were spitting out quick sentences as their spotlights snapped on and off deserves a medal.

The Marriage of Bette and Boo was originally a one-act staged in 1973 at Yale, where Durang was studying. Six years later Durang expanded it to its current 85-minute intermissionless length for a New York production. Audiences won’t likely see a better rendition anywhere.