We can play Doctor whenever you want.

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Mr. Marmalade - Noah Haidle - 2006

In Noah Haidle’s absurdist play, Mr. Marmalade, a four-year-old girl named Lucy tries to have a healthy relationship with her chronically absent imaginary friend, the title character, who never has any time for her. The conflation of reality and the imaginary is an old trick in the book, more notably used in texts like Don Quixote, in which characters’ delusions take them on ridiculous and often hilarious quests. Usually the imaginary worlds the protagonists dream up feed some desire to return to a better place or to achieve something impossible. In the case of Mr. Marmalade, the reality is bleak – a single mother who brings home a new guy every night and works all day leaving Lucy on her own or with neglectful babysitters all day – and the imaginary is not necessarily bleak, but it is extreme.

In the climactic scene, after persuading Lucy to come back to him, Mr. Marmalade impregnates the four-year-old girl, returns to his alcoholism, drug addiction, and abusive ways, and drives Lucy to stab their child in a desperate attempt to keep him in the house. It’s difficult to parse out the reality and the un-reality in this play, and it is even more difficult to do so when reading it and not seeing it performed. The comedy, in general, derives from the absurdity of a four-year-old girl finding and putting herself in these very adult and scary situations by dreaming them up herself. At first glance, the absurdity is enough, but as the scenes become progressively darker, the audience starts to wonder: how on earth did this toddler come up with these horrific scenarios?

That aside, I would like to examine some of the more comedic/violent scenes a little more closely. In scene three, or “Concerning Countless More Hardships Which Lucy Endured with Regard to Her Imaginary Friends, If You Can Even Call Them That,” Bradley, Mr. Marmalade’s abused assistant, appears to find her just after she’s – has she really had sex with a five-year-old boy? we know they played Doctor, but... – played Doctor with Larry to give her a card from Mr. Marmalade. Lucy replies when asked to read it, “I can’t read yet.” This joke, which becomes a running joke throughout the play, is just one of many lines meant to jolt viewers out of the imaginary world.

A large part of the comedy comes from seeing how far Haidle will go in the construed reality of Lucy’s relationship with Mr. Marmalade and how large the gap will be between what we think of as a normal four-year-old and Lucy. By tying Lucy down to reality just enough so that we remember she is four (she would be played by an adult actress playing four playing House) and by stretching the imaginary world as far and as dark as possible, Haidle keeps the suspension of disbelief alive. There are just enough statements like Mr. Marmalade dismissing Larry because he is unemployed to which Lucy would retort, “He’s five.” that the audience can laugh at the jokes and at the horribleness of Lucy’s predicament.

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