Groucho Marx Meets T.S. Eliot is a play by local playwright Jeffrey Hatcher that dramatizes a dinner between pen pals Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot. Although that sounds way more straight forward than this play actually is. What we get is multiple versions of the evening in which they try it as Groucho’s game show You Bet Your Life, or as a scene from one of the Marx Brothers movies. Like a Marx Brothers film you are never sure where this play will go next. The topics range from old Groucho routines to a debate about whether T.S. Eliot was antisemitic. There is discussion about breaking the fourth wall and then there is breaking the fourth wall. There are a couple of short songs performed and we even get appearances from the You Bet Your Life ducks. It’s laugh out loud funny at times and actually raises some interesting thoughts about issues such as copyright law and happiness. Hatcher crams an awful lot into a brisk 75 minute runtime which flies by but also seems like the perfect length.

The cast consists of Jim Cunningham as Groucho Marx and John Middleton as T.S. Eliot. Let me start with Eliot because I know next to nothing about him and certainly had no idea what he looked or sounded like. I have seen Cats and was aware it was based on his poetry and I seem to have some recollection of his poem The Waste Land coming up in connection with The Great Gatsby. I’ve no idea if that connection is real or imagined to be honest, it’s a memory from about 40 years ago. So Middleton had a lot of leeway to do what he wanted and if the narrative is accurate in terms of his character, he played it superbly. Middleton does a fantastic Chico Marx impression when he and Groucho reimagine the evening as the trial from Duck Soup.

Cunningham has an uphill battle against decades of familiarity with Groucho. I’ve seen all of the films, I’ve watched many YouTube videos of Groucho on talk shows, I used to watch rebroadcasts of his You Bet Your Life with my Dad as a teenager. I was in my twenties but my Dad like to pretend he was a teenager when we watched. It’s hard not to wish that Cunningham had gone a little further towards capturing the Groucho we all know. In every other respect he does a fine job, there are flashes of Groucho, which is a reasonable choice. He presents Groucho as a man who has come to meet someone and have dinner at their house, he gives a flash of performance to please Eliot and the audience but doesn’t want to play the “Groucho character” in his personal life. It’s a valid choice, but it’s not the one the audience is hoping for. Though perhaps the play doesn’t work if he goes the full Groucho?

Fans of either of these two 20th century legends will get a kick out of this what might have happened play. Groucho Marx Meets T.S. Eliot runs through March 15th at the Center for Performing Arts in South Minneapolis. For more information and to purchase tickets go to https://www.illusiontheater.org/groucho-meets-ts-eliot

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