As a native of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I see playwright-performer James Braly as a mirror image of the cool dads half my friends had growing up. Those were the dads who disproportionately ended up divorcing the moms, often for a younger woman. But Braly, who gave up his Central Park West apartment to improve his family life, has not divorced his wife Susan, despite having ample reason and opportunities to do so over the past twenty years. Having inherited an unstable family life from his childhood, Braly is a man who can’t thrive unless there’s a minimum baseline of chaos in his life. To use a phrase my mom used for my dad, Braly has two speeds: fast and off.

Braly got his expensive apartment as a speechwriter, and his skills as a writer are apparent throughout Life in A Marital Institution. The script never misses an opportunity for a punch line; one can easily see a politician using Braly's seemingly endless reservoir of verbal jabs.  But more important than his natural sense of humor is Braly’s ability to distribute the blows equally among family, friends, and himself. Life in A Marital Institution achieves a balance between Braly’s self-righteousness and self-loathing that is rare in a one-man show. After years of writing speeches where the focus is on artifice, Braley has two decades' worth of truth-telling in store that the monologue format allows him to blurt out for an hour.

Photo by Jaisen Crockett

As easily as writing comes to Braly, he is not a natural performer. This is a double-edged sword for the play's overall impact. On the one hand, his plain old regular-guy storytelling performance style is a welcome relief, keeping things fresh throughout the evening. On the other hand, Braly’s performance will often betray his writing, as some lines don’t hit as hard as they should. In part to overcome his lack of an actor’s instincts, Braly has a tendency to mug with an annoying smirk when he delivers a particularly smart line. Once things turn serious, however, that smirk vanishes. As a performer, Braly is at his best when he is most vulnerable.

The tribulations of married life aren't exactly a new concept for drama, but Braly’s marital circumstances are legitimately exceptional. No primetime sitcom would touch James and Susan’s marriage, which includes planning on breastfeeding their two sons until the age of seven, having the entire family sleep in the same bed, and holding dinner parties where parents discuss eating their wives' placentas.