Carol Mulroney, who spends most of the night on the roof of her urban town house, is indeed inexplicably sad. Belber gives us some of the reasons -- a troubled marriage, a childhood tragedy, a complex relationship with her father, an untrustworthy friend -- and has the characters around this young woman spend a lot of time describing her sadness. He also has them talk about her other qualities, and we see her in a variety of moods. Clearly, he wants to depict a complicated person whose motives and desires are often mysterious, even to herself.
But there's a difference between mystery and confusion. In plays, if not in life, we look for some kind of exploration of the mystery -- not a tidy resolution, but a coherent, emotionally satisfying narrative that, by the end, makes us feel that we have walked a path with a real human being and gained some insight into her sorrows and joys. What ''Carol Mulroney" gives us instead is a collection of monologues and images, some wonderfully intelligent and some depressingly crude in both language and thought, that leave us, 90 minutes later, struck mainly by the observation that Carol's most typical line is ''I don't know."
As Carol, Ana Reeder manages to inflect this line with various shadings of puzzlement and wonder; she speaks and moves like an exploring, tentative child, which feels right. Like the other gifted actors onstage with her, however, Reeder is hamstrung by a script that at once under- and over-explains. Belber's speeches can run almost shockingly long, and they're full of literary-sounding phrases. But somehow you can't quite get a grip on who these people are; it's as if the language obscures, rather than clarifies, their true natures.
