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Wintertime
by Marianne Combs, Minnesota Public Radio
February 5, 2003

Jeff Cribbs plays Jonathan, a young man who hopes to propose to his girlfriend, but ends up confronting the vaguaries of love through the behavior of his parents. (Image courtesy of the Guthrie Theatre, photographer T. Charles Erickson )

At at time of growing cynicism about the institution of marriage, the Guthrie Theater examines the virtues and vices of modern-day relationships. In "Wintertime," opening tonight at the Guthrie Lab in Minneapolis, playwright Charles Mee sets love in a cold climate to see if it can survive.

Minneapolis, Minn. — In "Wintertime", young Jonathan brings his girlfriend, Ariel, to his family's summerhouse with the intention of proposing. To their surprise, they find the house already occupied by Jonathan's mother Maria and her French lover Francois.

Things get even more complicated when, minutes later, Jonathan's father, Frank, appears with his lover Edmund. Frank and Maria are still married and despite their affairs claim to be faithful to one another while the jealous lovers fight for attention. Soon Ariel and Jonathan are both thinking marriage isn't such a good idea.

	Wintertime

Playwright Charles Mee says he wrote Wintertime in response to what he saw around him.

"When you look around the world today, and see how many marriages end in divorce, how many love affairs are broken up by unfaithfulness, and how varied, wonderfully varied and diverse but also immensely complex human love relationships have become in our time - is it possible for two young people just to set out and expect to have a love and marriage that lasts forever?" he says.

	The cast

Mee has been known in the past for writing dark, painful works. He says he was trying to write a deranged unhappy play when he wrote "Summertime," a frothy romantic comedy. It features all the same characters as Wintertime, but in a different season. The director tried to turn it back into a typical Charles Mee play by bringing out all the hidden dark and depressing themes, but he couldn't find any.

"I looked at it and I thought 'but I could do that,'" he says. "I could turn that story upside down and do all the painful stuff underneath, so I thought I'll take the same characters in the same summer house but I'll put it in the middle of winter and I'll write a tragedy. So I set about to do that and out again came this frothy romantic comedy. So I guess I've stopped trying to write dark twisted nasty plays and just decided to live with these sweet plays for a while."

Perhaps "bittersweet" would be a better description of Wintertime. It is indeed a romantic comedy, but amidst the laughs it also underscores some of the sad truths of broken relationships, as when Frank confronts Maria about her multiple affairs.

When she says she was only acting on her appetite for life he says her interest was not for the whole of life.

"The whole of life includes many other things including the paradox of faithfulness and freedom... the difficulty of remaining faithful and still discovering freely and completely what it is to be a human being!" he says.

"I couldn't do both at the same time, it was too much," she responds.

"You were doing neither one!" he replies.

Mee has some experience in love, both failures and successes. He's currently engaged to the woman who will be his third wife. He says falling in love at his age -- his mid-60s -- has had a profound effect on his writing.

"The older I've gotten the happier I've become and I'm engaged to be married now and can't help but be a happy person."

Wintertime runs through March 2 at the Guthrie Lab.

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