Fran’s Bed

When Mia Farrow, born Maria de Lourdes Villiers Farrow, was married to Andre Previn and living in London, she decided to pass time in her conductor husband’s absences by joining the Royal Shakespeare Company. For a while she became quite active with that august troupe, appearing in such plays as The Three Sisters and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Indeed, Farrow has done more stage acting abroad than stateside: Her sole Broadway credit is Bernard Slade’s Romantic Comedy (1979-80, with Tony Perkins), while her scant Off-Broadway credits are the recent Exonerated and an Importance of Being Earnest in which she appeared some 40-plus years ago, shortly before being lured to Hollywood and a star-making stint in the TV series Peyton Place.

Now she has been enticed to play the terminally ill Francesca Dubin in James Lapine’s family drama Fran’s Bed, to which she contributes a luminous presence. Farrow’s Fran seems other-worldly decades before an overdose of Percocets compounded by other ingredients sends her into a coma from which she isn’t expected to emerge. This woman gives the impression of not fitting into her life from the moment that she meets Hank Dubin (Harris Yulin) at a Jewish wedding right up through her raising of daughters Birdie (Julia Stiles) and Vicky (Heather Burns). The only time she appears to be briefly at ease is during an extra-marital fling with family friend/tennis foe Eddie (Jonathan Walker).

During the years when the entralling Farrow was Woody Allen’s leading lady and muse, she proved that she could play any woman he imagined her to be, but her specialty has always been a child/woman of porcelain-doll beauty who’s so timid that she has to work up the courage to say boo to a goose. She brought this quality to Rosemary’s Baby, and it’s one of the reasons why she made a creditable Daisy Buchanan in the 1974 Great Gatsby film.

Now 60 but looking at times as if she’s 20 and about to make Frank Sinatra go ring-a-ding-ding, she still comes across as a reed in the wind. Wandering around the stage in a hospital gown that Susan Hilferty has designed so that it resembles a Rei Kawakubo party dress, Farrow’s Fran is someone who has always tried to do what’s right and to understand what’s going on around her but has often fallen short of her noble aspirations. Gazing at her replica lying inert in a hospital bed, she is touching and true; seeing her daughters arrive at her bedside, her smile is open and hopeful and utterly heartbreaking.

Is Farrow simply playing author-director Lapine’s lines, or is this a case of an actress supplying content out of her own resourcefulness where the dramatist has only provided bare outlines? The latter seems to be the case, with Lapine falling short of his playwriting obligations and with Farrow doing all the work. Though Lapine has worked on the script during a New York Stage and Film season and at the Long Wharf in 2003, he hasn’t yet come up with the full-fledged character study he seeks.

This is a work that examines Fran Dubin’s place as a wife and mother at the end of an inconclusive life; but as Lapine flashes back to scattered moments from her “shiksa goddess” past, he doesn’t provide enough information about who she is or who she has been. He brings in aide Dolly (Brenda Pressley) to fuss over Fran and watch soap operas with her, but it’s unclear what he’s getting at when Fran and family show up on the tube in their own soap opera. (Perhaps he’s merely saying that everyone’s history can be reduced to boob-tube scale, but if so, what else is new?)

Also confusing to the audience is just how real two therapists (Jonathan Walker again and Marcia DeBonis, who also plays a hospice saleswoman) are meant to be as they coax Fran’s literal and figurative dreams from her. As dramatist, Lapine sketches in hubby Hank’s wearying love for his increasingly preoccupied wife; he also airs the friction between career-woman Birdie and homemaker Vicky, and gets a few genuine laughs when they discuss their checkered love lives. As director, he drives home the emotional distance among the four by staging a dinner where they sit many feet apart from one another. But Fran remains all too vague.

Derek McLane’s adaptable set (based on a Douglas Stein design) incorporates a turntable that pushes circular curtains from behind to reveal by turns a hospital room, a featureless motel room, and hospice quarters with a view of an Arizona sunset. (David Lander designed the lights and Fitz Patton the sound and original music.) Lapine’s work with the cast is generally laudable. Harris Yulin does occasionally appear to be underplaying — as if, a director himself, he’s reacting to the script’s deficiencies. But Heather Burns and Julia Stiles portray the daughters at various ages with understanding and affection. Brenda Pressley, Jonathan Walker, and Marcia DeBonis also emote deftly.

Still, this is the radiant Mia Farrow’s show — perhaps more than it should be. James Lapine may have made Fran’s Bed, but Farrow is the one demonstrating how to lie in it.