Six Years

“Marriage is a very good thing,” writes lyricist Tom Jones in the ultraschmaltzy dinner-theater staple I Do! I Do!, “though it’s far from easy.” With Phil and Meredith Granger, the miraculously long-lasting couple at the center of White’s 2006 drama, the latter sentiment is the understatement of the American Century.

White’s 2006 play resembles the musical in its depiction of a married couple over several decades (in the Grangers’ case, from roughly the end of World War II to the end of the Vietnam conflict), but White shows little interest in reassuring us with a portrait of a mostly happy pair outlasting its petty problems. If anything, White demonstrates how the same problems that plague a marriage at the outset continue to haunt husband and wife through all their years together, no matter how much else changes.

As America lurches from the postwar boom years to the upheavals of the ’60s, not to mention the ups and downs in the couple’s personal lives (including the loss of a son in Vietnam), Phil remains, at the core, the bewildered, shell-shocked vet we meet in the first scene; Meredith, his somewhat affection-starved wife, is desperate to hold down the fort. Yoked in loneliness, they ultimately stay together thanks to some mix of determination and need.

Hutchinson’s small-but-searing production is fittingly claustrophobic; with the audience seated in the round, we feel trapped in the family’s living room and party to their dissection. As Phil and Meredith, Fawcett and Harman throb with tender resentment and quiet desperation.