Chasing Monsters

How did you spend your summer vacation?  Did you ever sit through a play and not understand or believe one thing that was happening on stage?  Well, I did.  This play, written by a young man whom I know as a very nice press agent with the Keith Sherman Agency in NYC, is a downright puzzlement.  How could experienced actors like Michael Learned, who is always a joy, and Ralph Waite, who has trod the boards in the best, and Jim McKenzie, longtime Executive Producer, choose a play as incoherent and repetitive as this?  It truly boggles the mind.

Set in Marjorie Kendall's (Michael Learned) small, rustic, log-cabin home in the Adirondacks of Upstate New York, Chasing Monsters first introduces Marjorie's anxiety-ridden daughter, Carolyn Nast, played nervously by Jenna Stern, who has just arrived with what appears to be a large wrapped picture in hand, which she gives to neighbor Jack Carlson to hide.  Played by Ralph Waite, who is very much older and thinner than he was in "The Waltons," Carlson, never married, is very much in love with Marjorie, despite the fact that townspeople think she's nuts. 

And so they should.  It seems Marjorie has sold the supermarkets left to her, for which she did some kind of work, a detail never explained.  She moved Upstate and spends most of her time, day and night, sitting in a rowboat on the lake, looking for a monster that ostensibly ate her late husband, Ed.  She claims they saw this monster in a tree, when she and her husband first moved there.  Soon, Carolyn's husband, Allan (Victor Slezak), bursts in and demands to know what has happened to his painting, a portrait of his wife, which, when hung in his upcoming show, he believes will finally bring him the fame and fortune that has eluded him for the past ten years.  Those ten years, Carolyn has supported him by doing  clerical work in a job she has just quit.  For those same years, she has also been lying to her mother, telling her that Allan is a professor.  And for those ten years, she has mourned being unable to pursue her art.  She swaps the painting for her wedding ring, and he slashes the painting to prove his love.  Oy! 

In the last few minutes, we discover that the loving Ed cheated on his wife regularly with her permission; his daughter caught him en flagrante delicto with a woman named Joan on the very same sofa in the living room.  Also, maybe Ed and Joan ran away together, or maybe Marjorie dumped them in the lake.  Your guess is as good as mine. 

At the end, they pose together for Carolyn, a la Painting Churches. Early on, Marjorie claims she can hear the monster moaning.  It wasn't the monster, Marjorie, it was ME!