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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Home is not always where the heart is; according to David Marshall Grant's rueful comedy "Pen" (directed by Will Frears, at Playwrights Horizons), sometimes family members can't find their hearts with two hands and a map. The drama here turns on the eponymous pen--a special one, as it happens--which the controlling, pessimistic, wheelchair-bound Helen Bayer (the excellent J. Smith-Cameron), a victim of multiple sclerosis, uses to write while lying down. Her dutiful, gawky son, Matt (Dan McCabe), who has a little problem with kleptomania, has stolen it to fill out his application to the University of Southern California, his dad's alma mater, acceptance to which would take him thousands of miles from this cozy patch of suburban Long Island and from his toxic, symbiotic arrangement with his divorced mother. "It's one thing to steal," Helen says to Matt about the pen. "But to implicate a maid. How low can you get?" The question the play raises is just who here is stealing from whom.
Helen wants her son at home with her. Constantly reminding him of her illness--"When you're crippled, you can have your own remote control"--she smothers him with demands, for food, for physical assistance, for him to fill out an application to the nearby state university at Stony...
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