Midlife Worries Frame ‘Grace’s’ Perspective

LA JOLLA--A senator’s wife is missing. Margaret Grace Braxton’s abandoned car has been discovered outside her son’s school.

Besides her claim to fame, Margaret is a mother of three and a daughter whose parents’ deaths prompt her to think a lot about her own mortality.

She’s also the centerpiece of Heather McDonald’s “When Grace Comes In,” a lyrical and excessively languorous new play at La Jolla Playhouse.

“When Grace Comes In” asks us to spend nearly three hours examining Margaret’s midlife crisis in painstaking detail. The strangest thing about it is that Margaret doesn’t seem all that depressed.

Despite many references to the character’s sadness, Jane Beard portrays Margaret as oddly upbeat, even cheery. In a way, this is a relief; the play would seem longer if Margaret were unremittingly dour or despairing. Yet Margaret’s demeanor leads one to wonder why her crisis is compelling enough to merit this much attention.

By the end, it appears that Margaret’s main problem--aside from the usual issues that most people face as they pass through middle age--is that two decades ago she gave up her budding career as an art restorer to marry a law student who would soon represent Utah in Congress. She has since been caught up in the effort of raising their three kids.

Now, facing her own sense of the years passing, she decides to seize the day--first by taking a unscheduled 24-hour sabbatical inside the National Cathedral, enjoying the light and the vastness, and later by making a decisive return to her career. Apparently without telling anyone where she’s going, she takes a job in Venice.

The play hardly raises the question of whether there might have been some middle course. We do glimpse Margaret working as a volunteer docent at the National Gallery. Still, with all of the government-funded museums in Washington, surely a well-trained art student who’s married to a senator might find paid employment, perhaps even with an occasional trip to Italy. That this possibility is never mentioned makes the play seem like a throwback to the days when a senator’s wife would never look for a paying job.

For that matter, McDonald never addresses the special pressures of being a political wife. Although there is a brief reference to the endless quality of campaigning, we never see Margaret in the trenches of Utah. From what we see of her husband, he could just as easily have a high-pressure corporate job in any other big city.

Instead, we hear Margaret’s dreams, most of them involving water. We learn that her father drowned, and we see her mother slipping away into a watery illusion (the stage directions in the script say the mother has Alzheimer’s, but this isn’t clear in the dialogue) and quite literally going to join her father in a kind of afterlife.

We see Margaret’s special bonding with her son. In a streamlined flashback, Margaret and her husband meet in New York, and we sense their sexual sparks. We hear Margaret talking to a late-night radio call-in host.

Much of this is written with, well, grace. McDonald, whose “An Almost Holy Picture” was at La Jolla in 1995 and on Broadway earlier this year, is a gifted imagist. But her ear fails her in strained burlesque-style fantasy scenes involving an eccentric Polish paleontologist, whose diagnosis compels Margaret to take action.

Sharon Ott’s staging is immaculate, with spare but suggestive design elements, including a complex soundtrack. But the effort is disproportionate to the rewards.

“When Grace Comes In,” La Jolla Playhouse, La Jolla Village Drive and Torrey Pines Road. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. $39-$49. (858) 550-1010. Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes.

Jane Beard...Margaret Grace Braxton

Mark Chamberlin...Bill Braxton

Tommy Fleming...Claw Braxton

Mary Frances McClay...Doune Braxton

Shannon Fitzpatrick...Halley Braxton

Anne Gee Byrd...Belle

Mark Alan Gordon...Simon

Stephanie Berry...Roz Lapinski

Written by Heather McDonald. Directed by Sharon Ott. Set by Daniel Ostling. Costumes by Frances Kenny. Lighting by Michael Chybowski. Music and sound by Christopher R. Walker. Movement by Jean Isaacs. Stage manager Bret Torbeck.