Review: ‘Marvin’s Room’

Calamity comes in Costco-style jumbo packages for the fractured family in “Marvin’s Room,” Scott McPherson’s play about the beleaguering trials and little triumphs collectively known as life. Trials, I’m afraid, trump triumphs in this melancholy comedy. The title character alone has suffered a stroke and lost his colon to cancer. He’s got just one functioning eye and one remaining kidney. And did I mention the diabetes? But it’s not the travails of Marvin, who remains unseen throughout the play, bedbound and only heard from when he grows restive, that sets the plot in motion. It is the sudden illness of one…