Reed Birney and Lisa Emery in Lunar Eclipse. Photo: Joan Marcus
You remember George and Emily, don’t you, those endearing young lovers in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town? Well, they’re back—or rather versions of them are, newly incarnated and relocated in an achingly moving new play by Donald Margulies called Lunar Eclipse, devoted just to them. A Second Stage production, it’s playing now at Signature Theatre Center. Spoiler alert: Bring a handkerchief.
Wilder’s play follows George and Emily’s story through high school, wedding, and her death in childbirth, but Margulies’s couple appears to us in old age, looking back in time. Instead of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, Margulies’s play takes place in western Kentucky, in a field on the farm inherited from George’s family where the couple has lived all their married lives. George (Reed Birney) and Em (as she’s called here, played by Lisa Emery) gather to watch a lunar eclipse, a ritual they have shared throughout their many decades together. During that astronomical phenomenon, they review their shared past and envision the future and how their lives will end.
Margulies has devised a clever structure for this pas de deux: a series of short scenes (ninety minutes of stage time), each titled with the phases of the eclipse. One title follows another—“Penumbra shadow appears,” “Moon enters penumbra,” etc.—each introducing an insight into a phase of their shared lives. There are recognitions of the present: “I’m old; you’re old, too,” George begins, confessing that he is forgetting names and faces. Em fears she’s going to fall. George mourns the death of their dog Belle, whom he has just buried alongside the dogs of his father and grandfather.
The specter of death is ever-present on that dark night. By scene three, as the eclipse progresses, they face the tragedy that has shaped their later lives: the death of their adopted son, Tim, at age thirty-six from a drug overdose. “You shed more tears for that dog than for your own son,” Em accuses.
From the depths of their shared feelings of guilt and regret, they look at their marriage. “Could you make my life sound any more trivial?” she asks him, about her unappreciated traditional role as his caretaker (she brought hot cocoa and a blanket to the eclipse watch, which he refuses). As the sky darkens, she reveals a profound loneliness and grief following Tim’s death. “Why couldn’t we have cried together?” she asks.
George, meanwhile, is filled with dread. Occasionally he bursts into sobs, expressing a fearful premonition that something terrible is going to happen. “What if this time the forces of evil are here to stay?” he asks as the eclipse reaches its darkest phase. (Here, Margulies uses the astronomical phenomenon to offer a premonition about the world.) “We’re not going to live to see it coming around.”
As the red moon phase of the eclipse glows over the sky (on the stunning backdrop designed by Walt Spangler and lit by Amith Chandrashaker), they talk about their future. George offers a prophecy: He’ll die first. She’ll live twenty-two more years, go into assisted living, contract ovarian cancer and dementia.
Ultimately, George and Em emerge from “the saddest story there is” (namely, their lives, their inability to have biological children, their loss of Tim) to share a bottle of whiskey and some realizations. George: “I didn’t need the kids, not the way you did. I would have been happy with a houseful of dogs.” As the title of the sixth scene appears, “Moon leaves umbra,” he confesses to the “terrible sin of failing to love a child.” In “Penumbra shadow fades,” he speaks of the fear of losing his mind. She talks about her fear of losing him. They share a laugh, as she imagines heaven as a place to have a party. They recognize that after a marriage of more than half a century, “you don’t know the other person.”
In the very last scene of the play (spoiler alert), Margulies offers a deeply moving coup de theatre: The couple are suddenly teenagers again, on their first date, filled with energy and hope for the future. Their life cycle is completed, told in arresting reverse chronology (a variation of the time travels in Wilder’s play, where Emily dies and then comes back to Earth for a day).
Margulies’s delicate duet needs two strong actors to sustain it—and Reed Birney and Lisa Emery shine. Birney gives a deeply moving performance, embracing the complexities of his character—the stubbornness, the inflexibility, punctuated with sudden weeping that reveals his vulnerability and pain. Lisa Emery finds a path through the momentously emotional journey with touches of humor and a comforting vision of the end of life. “Let happen what will happen,” she says with a smile. “What we leave behind is not important.”
Kate Whoriskey directs with sensitivity and skill. Walt Spangler’s sweeping set with its tall grasses is overpowered by a stunning, dramatic sky that reflects the lunar eclipse in all its phases, lit gorgeously by Amith Chandrashaker.
Playwright Donald Margulies’s impressive dramatic oeuvre includes an earlier homage to another classic (his 1993 musical fantasy The Loman Family Picnic, inspired by Death of a Salesman). But Lunar Eclipse is a different, more serious effort—a kind of “sequel” to Our Town, written in the allegorical spirit of the Wilder classic that inspired it.
Ultimately, George and Em seem like an iconic couple of the American heartland, mid-twentieth century—more representative than real. But it is the context—the natural world and its supernatural aspects—that makes Lunar Eclipse a memorable, moving portrait of marriage and its lunar cycles of sorrow and joy, darkness and light.
What Samuel Beckett once wrote sums it up: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”