If there is something familiar about a play comprising disparate scenes from a single woman’s life, performed by five different actors, that is because it was the central conceit of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, adapted for the stage last year.
Mary Page Marlowe premiered before that, in 2016, at the Steppenwolf theatre in Chicago, and takes similar shape. There are 11 scenes, non-chronological, that travel 70 years around the life of Mary Page Marlowe, an accountant, wife to three husbands, mother to two children and daughter of an alcoholic, who becomes perilously dependent on drink herself. She too is portrayed by five actors (and a doll).
