Roundabout Eyes Mr. Marmalade for Off-B'way

Broadway.com has learned that the Roundabout Theatre Company is planning to present Noah Haidle's Mr. Marmalade off-Broadway at the Laura Pels Theater. No dates have been announced for the play, but a spring berth looks likely.

Mr. Marmalade is a look at the games people play as seen through the eyes of an extraordinarily advanced four-year-old child with a vivid imagination. In the long hours she spends without her preoccupied mother, young Lucy invents a strange new world and an even stranger man to inhabit it. Her imaginary friend, Mr. Marmalade, is extremely dapper and suave, but he is also a businessman too busy to spend time with the child who adores him. Soon he goes missing altogether. If the world in her head is not complicated enough, in the real world Lucy then befriends her five-year-old neighbor who has his own serious issues to work out.

South Coast Repertory presented the world premiere of Mr. Marmalade, directed by Ethan McSweeny, from April 25 through May 16, 2004 to mixed reviews. In his Variety review of that production, Joel Hirschhorn wrote: "The name Mr. Marmalade is the only sweet, tasty and benign aspect of South Coast Repertory's controversial world-premiere play. Written by 25-year-old Noah Haidle, the youngest author SCR has ever produced, Mr. Marmalade tries to show that the inner lives of 4- and 5-year-olds are just as tangled, sordid and sexually driven as those of adults. Haidle's vision is imaginative and audacious, but there's too little credibility, even allowing for fanciful elements, and not enough backstory to support the behavior of the main characters… Though he goes over the line, Haidle makes a valid point: Children's fears and perceptions are much darker than adults want to believe. Lucy's grim fantasies would have heightened resonance if the script went beyond brief glimpses of home life and past, permitting theatergoers to discover stronger links between the child's inner life and the actual horrors that triggered her complex, closeted world."

A Roundabout spokesperson could not confirm the company's plans to bring Mr. Marmalade to the New York stage. The theater company already has a full season at the Pels planned, with The Foreigner opening there in the fall and Stephen Belber's For Reele expected to premiere in the winter. In order to fit Mr. Marmalade in, either Belber's play would be postponed or a bonus production would be slated immediately after the For Reele run.