About the Play:

Mary Page Marlowe is a full-length drama by Tracy Letts. If you looked back on eleven moments from your life, would you recognize yourself, or would you see a stranger? Mary Page Marlowe is a seemingly ordinary accountant from Ohio who has experienced pain and joy, success and failure. This intimate and moving play shows us how circumstance, impulse and time can combine to make us mysteries… even to ourselves.

Mary Page Marlowe follows the life of one woman as she navigates different phases of her life. Mary Page Marlowe leads an unremarkable life, making the difficult decisions we all face as we try to figure out who we really are and what we really want. As an accountant in Ohio with two children, few would expect her life to be inordinately intricate or moving. However, it is choices – both pivotal and mundane – and where those choices have taken Mary Page Marlowe that make her life so intimate and surprisingly complicated. In this sweeping but intimate play, Pulitzer-and Tony-winning playwright Tracy Letts gives us a haunting portrait of a complex woman, demonstrating how a series of forgotten moments can add up to one memorable life.

Mary Page Marlowe premiered in 2016 at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. The New York premiere was in 2018 Off-Broadway at Second Stage's Tony Kiser Theater. The play has been performed in regional, fringe festival, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 11 female, 6 male, 1 girl

What people say:

"... deeply moving ... you feel an intense desire for more scenes, more time in your seat, a deeper dive into the life, times and fate of the protagonist you are watching." — Chicago Tribune

"Exquisite... Beautiful and affecting, like flipping through a friend's photo album in no particular order, finding some faces familiar, others unexpected... A haunting, elliptical drama about the evolutions, reversals and resurrections in a woman's life... It illuminates, movingly, how youthful ideals wither, how little of life can truly be foreseen, how provisional all our plans are in a world where choice and chance are always in tension." — New York Times

"Tracy Letts is a poet of the ordinary, a playwright who writes about commonplace lives in uncommon ways.... You'll be enthralled to watch Mary's life unfold, for it is described in a manner so clear and true that you cannot doubt its significance. Mary Page Marlowe is the most purely beautiful play that Mr. Letts has given us." — Talkin' Broadway

"This is Letts in contemplative mode, theatrically plumbing large questions like 'what is a person?' and, therefore, 'what is a life?'... Intensely thoughtful... the work has depth and an elegant potency... Mary Page Marlowe evokes a complex response that is both heady and emotional." — Variety

About the Playwright:

Tracy Letts is an American playwright, screenwriter, and actor who received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play August: Osage County. He is a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, where August: Osage County premiered.