Life in a Marital Institution

SPOUSE CALL Braly offers scenes from a marriage

Far be it from me to offer couples counseling to James Braly (goodness knows he’s paid for enough already), but if he and his wife ever do it over again, they should skip the home-birthing-in-a-kiddie-pool routine. When that episode arrives in Braly’s engaging solo piece, Life in a Marital Institution, you feel for him, the newborn and any other man whose wife has buffaloed him into a foolish New Age fad. What, you wonder along with him, has he gotten himself into?

Truthfully, Braly’s wife sounds like a real pill. A defensive hippie harpy who thinks nothing of breast-feeding her future-screwed kids to the age of six, she seems in sore need of traditional psychological care, not the tacky spiritualism she seeks in books such as My Summer with the Leprechauns: A Memoir. When he first met his wife-to-be in college, she grabbed a poem he was working on and started correcting it. Warning sign! It’s hard to blame Braly for toying with a hot Frenchwoman who seems intent on seducing him.

So it’s impressive that the marriage comes across as trying but three-dimensional, a constant negotiation with a loving foundation. As a performer, Braly mixes the right amount of self-deprecation, humor and mellowed resentment. His script displays the quick-paced, finely observed details of a comic raconteur who can hold a room captive. Hal Brooks, a veteran handler of one-person shows (Thom Pain, No Child), guides the tale through flashbacks with simple changes in light and the storyteller’s position. He and Braly make an excellent match.