Tracy Letts, one of most consistent playwrights, has tripped up with his latest, Mary Page Marlowe. One woman’s life in 11 scenes dramatized in non-chronological order, the play seems a riposte against his own epic study of dysfunction, August: Osage County, which for three hours brilliantly wallowed in the worst family members do to one another. Linking Osage and Mary Page is the central character’s predilection for alcohol, a cause of Mary Page’s difficulties in a life lived in the margins.

In these desultory scenes, her mismatched parents (cheating father, drinking mother) squabble, she confides in college friends that she refuses her beau’s marriage proposal, she gets married, has two kids and affairs, gets a divorce, gets remarried twice, gets jail time for a DUI, etc. 

Letts’ decision to present rearranged scenes from a life feels uncomfortably contrived as a way to give significance to something that is anything but. Unsurprisingly, each scene is intelligently written, concise and pointed; the telling opening—when 40-year-old Mary Page (an impressively harried Susan Pourfar) tells her children, 15-year-old Wendy and 12-year-old Louis, why she and their father are divorcing—is a lovely look at ordinary people that has humor, pathos and insight. Other scenes might be questionably included—do we need to see her adulterous dad and put-upon mom argue while their 10-month-old cries in the next room?—but they are sharply observed, showing Letts’ ability to empathize and show life’s essential absurdity without any condescension. 

Along with the excellent Pourfar, five other actresses play Mary Page. Standing out are Kellie Overbey, putting an empathetic point on the 50-year-old’s discussing her impending prison term with her second husband, and Blair Brown, sublimely portraying an older, maybe wiser heroine. Best of all is Tatiana Maslany, whose Mary Page at ages 27 and 36 provides moments of remarkable acuity and beautiful subtlety: her amusing back and forth with a shrink about her adultery is followed by a hotel tryst with her boss that for once allows her to be a formidable woman and a sexual being; these scenes hint at the tougher, more incisive play that might have been.

Despite Letts’ bravura writing of individual moments, it finally adds up to little as we are no further along to understanding or sympathizing with this woman at the end as we were 90 minutes earler: a few more scenes would fill out missing links in her relationships and sense of self-worth. Director Lila Neugebauer’s sensitive staging helps, to a point: the final coup of all Mary Pages on the upper level of Laura Jellinek’s cleverly two-tiered set watching the final scene underlines what’s missing: a life lived to its fullest, which these snapshots do not add up to.