John Guare, best known for offbeat dark comedies, The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation.
NYT review: Mr. Guare fashions an absurdist comedy about chaos at the dawn of a new age. His motif here is the act of transformation: how we, the restless souls of the planet, ceaselessly seek to reinvent ourselves even as the swirl of events reinvents us. On the Norwegian iceberg, where Stony McBride is making a movie about Marco Polo, gather a cross section of the world's elite, all of whom are either physically or psychically displaced. A movie director dreams of escaping his life through space travel, an astronaut's wife is in hiding disguised as a Nordic chambermaid, a messianic politico loses his legs to an endurance-champion piranha, and a counter-cultural actress-mother reveals that her gender was changed by surgical magicians at Johns Hopkins.
The story, clearly, has none of the nursery-rhyme simplicity that its title suggests. Everyone on this unseasonably warm berg, is in high dudgeon most of the time. And though it's a busy play -- Mozart, Ibsen, a cure for cancer, Fillmore East, Leif Ericsson and the musical ''Hair'' all figure in the very long monologues Mr. Guare generously doles out to the actors -- nothing happens to these people that makes us want to get to know them. They're interchangeable pieces in some pretty silly word games.
One can empathize with the challenges the actors faced. [e.g.] killer speeches that go on and then on some more, and Mr. Norris has the somewhat humiliating task of transforming himself, in the manner of ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' into an infant. And then the entire ensemble has the unenviable task of dodging nuclear-charged bolts of sperm aimed at them from outer space.
"Marco Polo" has not aged particularly well. Like a space capsule on the fritz, the play gets stuck in perpetual orbit, floating somewhere out there, high above our heads.