The Gentleman Caller combines kernels of fact with lots of fancy. In this two-character play, Chicago dramatist Philip Dawkins imagines the early friendship of Tennessee Williams (1911–83) and William Inge (1913–73). Beginning as a rowdy pastiche of sex comedies popular on Broadway when Inge and Williams were active there, the play turns darker in a handful of well-written monologues that are highly engaging but don’t add up to a convincing portrait of either character.
Classic Stage Company and Transport Group are taking a fresh look at Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke. Critical estimation of this lyrical drama—the playwright's fourth Broadway outing—has fluctuated since its 1948 premiere. After the original New York presentation, Summer and Smoke seemed destined for obscurity. But Jose Quintero’s 1952 production for Circle in the Square was a triumph and, according to many commentators, marked the birth of Off-Broadway. The current revival, under sure-handed direction by Jack Cummings III, discards the realistic trappings of mid-20th-century American theater and features a nearly ideal cast.
"While the radical composer John Cage (1912–92) was alive, it seemed easier to dismiss him as an irritating crackpot than it does now."
That rhetorical flourish, from critic Alastair Macaulay of the New York Times, is as outlandish as any of Cage's own colorful, self-conscious proclamations; but it captures the crescendo of acclaim accorded this American avant-garde composer over the 25 years since his death. Macaulay's recent assertion that "no study of 20th-century music is complete without Cage" would have been argumentative a quarter century ago. Now it's an accepted tenet of commentary on music history.
Damon Chua’s Incident at Hidden Temple, the current offering of Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, takes place in 1943 China, a dramatic juncture in East-West political relations and highly promising background for a play. The Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communists, usually incompatible as water and oil, have forged an alliance to resist Japan’s aggression. The two political groups—led, respectively, by Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao Tse-Tung—are restive bedfellows, with scant potential for long-term cooperation.
Made in China is a decidedly adult musical from Wakka Wakka, a New York–based theater company that prides itself on challenging “the boundaries of the imagination” with “bold, unique, and unpredictable” entertainments. This visually engaging production is performed by a host of black-veiled puppeteers manipulating intricately crafted bunraku-style puppets designed by Kirjan Waage. The script, by Waage and Gwendolyn Warnock (“with help from the Made in China Ensemble”), pushes the boundaries of puppet earthiness with a vengeance—it features puppet nudity, a puppet performing ordinarily private bodily functions, puppet copulation (both human and canine), and a puppet-dragon that has a mind-blowing digestive system.
Ninety-four years ago, the cast and producer of the Broadway production of Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance were jailed on grounds of obscenity. The jury trial that followed—a cause célèbre in New York State court—foreshadowed more protracted, better-remembered litigation regarding the merits of Ulysses by James Joyce and Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence.
It’s almost three decades since Richard Greenberg distinguished himself as the baby boomers’ Philip Barry. For audiences of the late 1980s, the dialogue of Greenberg’s breakout comedy Eastern Standard was as racy and iconoclastic as The Philadelphia Story had been to playgoers in the late 1930s; and the frolicsome plot and screwball characters had a joie de vivre reminiscent of Barry’s Holiday. At a moment when the Great White Way was being colonized by super-sized, techno-heavy musical productions imported from afar, Eastern Standard appeared to be reclaiming the New York Theater District for native wit and homegrown perspectives.
Signature Theatre, known for year-long retrospectives of the careers of living playwrights, is offering a sensory rich revival of The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World AKA The Negro Book of the Dead by Suzan-Lori Parks. This 1990 work from the writer whose Topdog/Underdog won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002 exists at the crossroads of theater and lyric poetry.
Editor's note: Sweat, which opened on Broadway March 26, was reviewed in November for Offoffonline by Charles Wright. His review is reprinted here:
Lynn Nottage's Sweat is tailored for the current juncture in American political life. This dark, often humorous drama concerns eight Rust Belt factory workers grappling with effects of industrial mechanization and the transfer of blue-collar jobs to other countries, especially Mexico, where operating costs are well below those in the United States.
The adventurous Playhouse Creatures Theatre Company is offering what’s labeled a “20th anniversary production” of Naomi Wallace’s One Flea Spare. This mordant historical drama didn't actually arrive in New York until 1997. It was a critical favorite at the 1996 Humana Festival of New American Plays in the playwright's hometown, Louisville, Ky.; and word of mouth from the Festival made its subsequent engagement at the Joseph Papp Public Theater one of the most anticipated events of the theater season. One Flea Spare, which derives its title from a poem by John Donne, is set in 1665 and portrays four people—a married couple and two strangers—trapped in a house that’s under quarantine. The place is the London of Daniel Defoe’s AJournal of the Plague Year, a work of fiction, which, Wallace has said, inspired the imaginative universe of her play. The current revival, directed by Caitlin McLeod and performed by a fine quintet of actors, is two relentless hours of powerful, if markedly cerebral, dialogue, with a number of narrative surprises for the first-time viewer.
Wallace wrote One Flea Spare in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, a public-health crisis that profoundly affected the American and British theater communities (and continues to do so). At that point, those infected with HIV had little expectation of longevity and those living with AIDS were subject to prejudice and a myriad of injustices. Defoe’s great novel and its portrait of plague-ravaged London was a natural point of historical reference for an erudite writer contemplating modern men and women contending with the spread of inexplicable disease.
Concetta Tomei (left) plays Darcy Snelgrave and Gordon Joseph Weiss is her husband, William, in Naomi Wallace's One Flea Spare. Top: Bunce (Joseph W. Rodriguez, left) helps the ill Mrs. Snelgrave. Photos by Monica Simoes.
In One Flea Spare, William and Darcy Snelgrave (Gordon Joseph Weiss and Concetta Tomei) are childless aristocrats whose home has been quarantined after the death of their servants from bubonic plague. Just as the Snelgraves are about to be released from forced isolation (which would allow them to flee London for the peace and presumed safety of the countryside), their premises are invaded by Bunce (Joseph W. Rodrigues), a virile, coarse-mannered sailor, and Morse (Remy Zaken), a 12-year-old servant disguised as the daughter of the upper-crust family whom she previously served. Both are seeking asylum from infection and the police.
The interlopers are a catastrophe for the Snelgraves. A municipal guard (Donte Bonner), charged with monitoring neighborhood compliance with hygiene regulations, sees them, bars the residence doors, and extends the quarantine. This means that four people from differing social strata of a rigidly hierarchical society must endure 28 days together in the closest quarters imaginable. As the play proceeds, the high-testosterone presence of Bunce unsettles the sex-starved Snelgraves and awakens unaccustomed responses in the pubescent Morse. Under stress of confinement, the characters' secrets and prejudices slip out, their yearnings boil up, and civility evaporates in the heat of compulsive drives and desires.
Scenic designer Bryce Cutler has configured the Sheen Center's black-box venue for intimate theater-in-the-round, with minimal space between actors and audience. The principal feature of his simple, handsome stage set is a tiny, raised platform on which the bulk of the action is played. Four of the five actors are crowded in that little square for much of the performance, while Bonner, playing the sole character not confined to the house, wanders around outside the square, addressing the other actors from a lower level that represents the street.
Sarafina Bush dresses the actors in drab-hued costumes that combine contemporary garments with items suggesting 17th-century style. Aaron Porter illuminates the stage in cold, wintry light. The effect of the creative team's design is a sense of unrelenting claustrophobia.
Donté Bonner, as Kabe, hawks plague remedies.
Wallace is an artist of extremes. Her characters are altruistic one minute, predatory the next. The dialogue veers precipitously from poetic to crass and profane. The effect of her prose is as often chilly as it is sensual. Her writing often soars with an operatic quality, fraught with emotion, that captures the characters’ sexual longing yet expresses the trauma created by their radical separation from the rest of the world. McLeod has staged the play with a great deal of dance-like movement that complements the musicality of Wallace’s text and depicts the play's eroticism and violence vividly but with a certain delicacy. Despite occasional lapses in dialect, the five actors handle the lyrical qualities of the playwright's lines and speeches effectively and function throughout as a balanced ensemble.
When One Flea Spare premiered at the Humana Festival, Wallace had already made a name for herself in Britain but was unfamiliar in her native land. During the past two decades, she has become well-known, at least for a playwright, in the United States. She has received a "genius grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (possibly the most enviable honor in the English-speaking world); and, since 2009, One Flea Spare has been the sole work by a living American author in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française, the French national theater. The current revival makes a strong case for One Flea Spare as the original, insightful work the critics judged it to be 20 years ago in Louisville and an enduring part of postmodernist drama.
Naomi Wallace’s One Flea Spare plays at the Sheen Center (18 Bleecker St.) through Nov. 13. Evening performances are at 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays. Tickets may be purchased by calling the box office at (212) 925-2812 or visiting sheencenter.org/shows/one-flea-spare/.
Thanks to Taylor Schilling, Emmy nominee for Orange Is the New Black, and Peter Dinklage, Emmy and Golden Globe winner for Game of Thrones, all performances of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country at Classic Stage Company (CSC) are sold out. The production, utilizing a new translation by American actor John Christopher Jones, is the first New York revival of Turgenev’s great play in 20 years. It’s overseen by the distinguished mid-career director Erica Schmidt, who previously directed Schilling and Dinklage in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya outside New York City and who happens to be married to Dinklage. Schmidt and her 13-member ensemble are discovering enormous humor, both subtle and ribald, in Turgenev’s complicated text, as well as the expected poignance.
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818–1883) was a contemporary of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Unlike Tolstoy and Dostoevky, he was educated in western Europe and lived much of his adult life in France. His writing, though equally concerned with Russian characters in Russian settings, is markedly different in perspective and tone from that of his Russian peers and lacks their preoccupation with religion and the spiritual life.
A Month in the Country depicts the effect of an outsider — a callow but appealing student from Moscow — on a clique of leisured aristocrats. The play, which Turgenev originally called The Student, was written in the 1850s but ran afoul of the Russian censors and wasn’t performed until 1872. In many ways, it presages the subjects and serio-comedic tone of Chekhov’s major plays. Dramatist Brian Friel, who created an adaptation of A Month in the Country for the Gate Theatre in Dublin, suggests that, in this drama, Turgenev wrote “Chekhovian characters and situations forty-six years before Chekhov wrote his first fully Chekhovian play, The Seagull.”
Natalya Petrovna Islayev (Schilling), married to a man several years her senior, has been conducting a chaste romance with a neighbor, Rakitin (Dinklage). Deeply concerned about maintaining a reputation for virtue, Natalya has managed to hide her wayward emotions from husband Arkady (Anthony Edwards), his vigilant mother (Elizabeth Franz), their gossipy physician (Thomas Jay Ryan), and other hangers-on (Peter Appel, Frank Van Putten and Annabella Sciorra). When Belyaev (Mike Faist) arrives as summertime tutor for Natalya’s son Kolya (Ian Etheridge), Vera (Megan West), Natalya’s 17-year-old ward, falls hard for him, as do Natalya herself and a servant, Katya (Elizabeth Ramos). The sexual tension that results could fuel a French farce; but Turgenev, who didn’t go in for farce, depicts instead how (as phrased by Rakitin in the classic translation by Constance Garnett): “[L]ove of every kind … is a real calamity if you give yourself up to it completely.”
Schmidt, scenic designer Mark Wendland, and lighting designer Jeff Croiter work skillfully together to give Turgenev's five acts, retooled in American vernacular by Jones, a momentum that seems quite contemporary. Schmidt and her actors have added some between-scenes action (played — or almost danced — in soft light) that serves to comment on the narrative and what the playwright has left unspecified. The between-scenes activities do not appear in the typescript of Jones’s new version of the play, so it’s a fair assumption that they're liberties — defensible liberties — of an innovative director who's in sync with her modern audience.
Audience members attracted by the television stars may be astonished at how fresh and contemporary this 165-year-old comedy-drama feels. Schilling and Dinklage in particular handle their soliloquies, the most antiquated aspect of the text, with a light but never dismissive style that gives those speeches verisimilitude comparable to the “couch interludes” in an episode of Modern Family. But what's crucial is the power of Turgenev’s play, no matter the translation, to transcend its mid-19th century context, bridging the chasm between European Romanticism and modernity.
A Month in the Country by Ivan Turgenev presented by Classic Stage Company (136 East 13th Street between Third and Fourth Avenues), runs Tuesdays through Thursdays at 7 p.m., Saturdays at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m., and Sundays at 3 p.m. through Sunday, February 22. Tickets start at $75. Running time is two hours, including one intermission. Tickets may be purchased by visiting www.classicstage.org or calling 212-352-3101, 866-811-4111 or at the box office.
Supply has a curious relationship to demand in New York theater, and it’s nowhere more perplexing than in the realm of Off and Off-Off Broadway Shakespearean productions. Last season, New York companies offered what must have been an unprecedented number of Shakespeare’s greatest hits (including four stagings of King Lear), but few, if any, of infrequently seen works such as Titus Andronicus. The current season, with its much lower Shakespearean quotient, has already yielded two Tituses. Go figure!
The first Titus was last autumn’s Puppet Titus Andronicus, an idiosyncratic entertainment, strictly for adults, in which plush, Henson-inspired puppets enacted episodes of sex and gore with generous amounts of “silly string” representing bodily fluids. Now the ambitious New York Shakespeare Exchange is presenting a more faithful, less fanciful version of the tragedy, adapted and directed by Ross Williams, the company’s artistic director.
Possibly written in collaboration with George Peele, Titus Andronicus follows the form and traditions of Jacobean revenge drama, with a plot that features all the feuding, murder, and rape one expects, plus some extra-gory embellishments such as dismemberment and cannibalism. Shakespeare’s most notable source for Titus is Ovid’s account of Philomela and her sister Procne, wife of King Tereus of Thrace. After raping his sister-in-law, Tereus cuts out her tongue to discourage disclosure of his dirty deeds. The mutilated Philomela outwits him by weaving her sad story into an accusing tapestry; and the sisters avenge Tereus’s villainy by slaughtering his sons, and then cooking and feeding their flesh to the unsuspecting father. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the sisters are transformed into birds to elude Tereus’s counter-vengeance. Shakespeare dispenses with the Ovidian magic, closing his tragedy on a body-strewn stage.
Titus Andronicus is clearly an early Shakespearean work: The dramatic construction follows closely the model of Senecan tragedy; the characters’ motivations are at times obscure; and the play’s violence rises to Grand Guignol gratuitousness. There’s little indication here that this playwright was destined, perhaps a mere decade later, to rework the raw materials of English revenge drama as Hamlet, the most masterful revenge play of all time.
Williams has set his adaptation in a carnival tent, with all the play’s action under the big top (imaginatively designed by Jason Lajka). The performance begins with a rambunctious, wordless prologue in which members of the company assail each other, killing one minute and being killed the next. It’s a dance of cruelty and death that sets the tone for everything that follows. At stage left is an old-fashioned livestock feed chute with a pull-cord that the actors jerk in order to punctuate violent attacks with the racket of corn kernels — thousands of them — rattling down the chute into a tin tub. The clatter from the noisy chute persists, accompanying each violent act, throughout the evening.
The youthful cast is headed by Brendan Averett, a formidable Titus, the Roman general whose pride and blind patriotism set the gruesome plot in motion. Gretchen Egolf, as Tamora, Queen of the Goths, and Warren Jackson as her lover, Aaron the Moor, give the evening's most extravagant performances, attacking the sinister lyricism of Shakespeare's verse with an operatic intensity that strays close to burlesque without quite crossing the line.
Last year, when Lucy Bailey’s production of Titus opened at Shakespeare’s Globe on the South Bank of the Thames, the London Times reported that “the stage blood and mutilation” were “so realistic” that “spectators were dropping like flies.” Such is not the case with the New York Shakespeare Exchange production. Here the violence, designed by fight choreographer Alicia Rodis, is stylized and largely bloodless; and costume designer Elivia Bovenzi manages to suggest mutilation and maiming imaginatively rather than explicitly. Nonetheless, the production is squirm-inducing throughout, as Williams and the rest of the creative team no doubt intend. It’s a powerful depiction of a realm in which cruelty is the norm and violence is inescapable. This Titus puts one in mind of video games and Hollywood action films — as well as much that's been chronicled on the front page of The New York Times during the first few weeks of 2015.
Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare, adapted by Ross Williams, presented by New York Shakespeare Exchange, at the Main Stage Theater at HERE (145 Sixth Avenue; entrance on Dominick Street), runs through Sunday, February 8. Performances are from Tuesday to Saturday at 8:30 p.m., and Sunday at 4 p.m. Tickets: $18. Running time is two hours and 20 minutes, including one intermission. Tickets may be purchased online at www.here.org or by calling 212-352-3101.
William Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet early in his career, and it’s one of his most frequently performed works. During the past year, New York City has seen two high-profile presentations of the play, both of which were handsomely outfitted and disappointing. The youthful artists of What Dreams May Company (WDMC) are currently offering a frugal production of Romeo and Juliet that strikes fire where the efforts of those more affluent troupes fizzled.
Soon to observe its fourth anniversary, WDMC has been producing streamlined, penny-pinching Shakespeare in a tiny, upstairs space on West 133rd Street. For Romeo and Juliet, the company has moved to larger, though still modest, street-level quarters in the East Village. Scenic designer Joseph Sebring retains the black-box aesthetic of WDMC's Harlem productions. Director Chris Rivera and his 16 actors are making effective use of several additional square yards of playing area, especially in the soirée at which the lovers first encounter each other and the violent scenes, which have been skillfully choreographed by fight director Nicole Schalmo and assistant Justin Kirck.
Rivera is working with a radically uneven cast, whom he guides through the play's complicated text with an assured directorial hand. His greatest asset is Jonathan Emerson, seen in 2013 as Macduff, the moral center of WDMC's Macbeth, and, earlier this year, as an unnervingly sour Don John in Much Ado About Nothing. Emerson has transformed himself, both in affect and physical appearance, from those prior roles. His Romeo isn't far beyond adolescence and, obsessed with romantic notions, he's at once sophomoric and sympathetic. With Juliet, he's earnest and shy; but, when he's in the company of his buddies (Casey Noble as Benvolio and Nicole Schalmo as Mercutio), a swaggering machismo testifies to his youthful insecurity. Emerson's every stance and gesture, though unmannered and seemingly unstudied, contributes to an arresting, thoroughly believable interpretation of one of English literature's most familiar characters.
As Juliet, Christina Sheehan embodies young love’s impatience in interesting ways: she’s audacious and, at times, downright pushy. There's a naughtiness about her that suggests she learned a lot that Renaissance maidens weren’t supposed to know from the bawdy jokes and unbridled recollections of her Nurse (Clare Solly). In Solly's hands, that Nurse (often treated as an Elizabethan stock comic) is full of verve and lusty humor with an undertone of profound melancholy. In the last moments of the play, Solly conveys complex grief -- she has previously spoken of the untimely death of her own daughter, Susan, and it's clear that, for her, the news of Juliet's sorry fate disinters all the pain of that earlier loss.
Since its founding in 2011, WDMC has been committed to counteracting the limitations of the Shakespearean canon by creating on-stage opportunities for women. Schalmo, who was a hyper-sexual Lady Macbeth last year, demonstrates her range as Mercutio, cousin of the Prince of Verona and close friend to Romeo. In Schalmo's nontraditional interpretation, Mercutio is a brazen, seemingly carefree, aristocratic young woman capable of becoming serious as soon as she's drawn into the Montague-Capulet feud. Schalmo proves herself adept at broad comedy, drunk scenes, and dying in clear view of the audience; and, in her duel with Tybalt (Marcus Watson), she demonstrates some graceful moves and convincing sword-handling.
On opening night, director Rivera stepped into the role of Friar Lawrence, replacing Matthew Healy who had been injured in an accident. Youthful in appearance, Rivera plays the good Friar as a well-meaning soul who fled the world for the monastery before gaining sufficient experience to make him a reliable aid to the hapless lovers seeking his guidance. In the second half of the performance under review, Rivera relied on a script disguised as a prayer book; both on script and off, he gave an assured, insightful reading of this pivotal character.
WDMC, which produces in association with the nonprofit Queens Shakespeare, is adept at operating on a shoestring. Sebring's simple scenic design for Romeo and Juliet utilizes three revolving panels for entrances and exits, boldly colored wall hangings by painter Matthew Emerson, and a couple of scarlet draperies. Like the set, the costumes (primarily white and black) feature bright red accents. Costuming is credited to Rivera but the actors are dressed in items that could come from their own closets. The Verona that this production conjures, like the themes of Romeo and Juliet, is at once timeless and up-to-date.
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, presented by What Dreams May Co. in association with Queens Players, runs through Dec. 20 at The Kraine Theater (85 East 4th Street between the Bowery and 2nd Avenue). It runs Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 7 p.m. Tickets: $18. Running time is two hours and 20 minutes including one intermission. Tickets may be purchased by visiting http://wdmcstarcrossed.brownpapertickets.com or calling 1-800-838-3006.
George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara challenges Percy Bysshe Shelley’s assertion that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world." So long as governments co-exist uneasily and individuals are unable to live in harmony with those sharing the planet, suggests Shaw in his 1905 play, munitions-makers will rule the global roost.
Major Barbara, currently revived at The Pearl Theatre Company, didn't arrive on Broadway until 1915, by which time World War I was well underway in Europe. The play begins as high comedy, shifts disconcertingly to naturalism in Act Two, and concludes with a fantastical debate in which the title character (Hannah Cabell), a Salvation Army officer, and her fiancé, Adolphus Cusins (Richard Gallagher), undergo changes of heart that strain credibility to a greater extent than usual in Shaw's work. Despite its structural flaws, Major Barbara is a perpetual crowd-pleaser; this comedy-drama and its heroine may be second only to Pygmalion and its principals, Liza and Professor Higgins, as Shaw's audience favorites.
When the last prominent New York revival of Major Barbara opened (with Cherry Jones in the lead), the towers of the original World Trade Center still drew the eye to lower Manhattan; and Americans were enjoying the benefits of an extended era of peaceful (or relatively peaceful) relations abroad. Six days before the play’s scheduled closing, the Trade Center was attacked by air and both towers were destroyed. That tragedy moved the U.S. President to declare a Global War on Terror and to sign, two days after the play's closing, the Authorization for Use of Military Force. The years since have been marked by American combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, as well as fluctuating economic conditions, with an ever-widening gap between rich and poor. Shaw's concerns about poverty, privilege, war, and religion seem more urgent now than they did in the summer of 2001.
As always at the Pearl, an array of accomplished actors is on view. Dan Daily gives the evening’s most notable performance as Barbara's father, the fiendishly clever Andrew Undershaft, an armaments kingpin who believes poverty to be the world's most heinous crime. Undershaft riffs on the Republic: “Plato says … that society cannot be saved until either the Professors of Greek take to making gunpowder, or else the makers of gunpowder become Professors of Greek.” Daily is well-matched by Gallagher as the geeky Greek tutor who, against all odds, becomes Undershaft's heir both in the family and on the world's political stage.
Major Barbara is directed by David Staller, founding artistic director of the Gingold Theatrical Group which is co-producing with the Pearl. The stylish production is designed by James Noone (scenery), Tracy Christensen (costumes), Michael Gottlieb (lighting), and M. Florian Staab (sound). Six of the nine actors handle two roles (or, in one case, three), moving effectively up and down the social ladder. In a program note, Staller explains this doubling as inspired by a remark of Shaw’s that, “but for an accident of birth,” characters such as the aristocratic Lady Britomart and the middle-middle-class Mrs. Baines, the Salvation Army Commissioner (both played by Carol Schultz), or the prim, high-born Stephen Undershaft and the unemployed lout Snobby Price (played by Alec Shaw), “might have become one or the other.” Christensen’s resourceful costume designs aid the actors in shifting swiftly from one social stratum to another in plain view of the audience. It’s a dash of Brecht in an evening of Shaw.
The great Irish dramatist named his play for Barbara but, as he revised it, her father emerged as the most forceful of the dramatis personae. In the wrong hands, Undershaft can overwhelm the other characters (especially in the last scenes). Daily tempers his performance, a model of actorly restraint, so as to recalibrate the lopsided exuberance of Shaw's text and ensure balance among Undershaft, Adolphus, and Barbara in their memorable but tricky last-act trio.
Shaw called the conclusion of Major Barbara “terrible” and lamented that, despite a quarter century of post-premiere tinkering, he couldn't eliminate the flaws. In the 2001 revival, the principal actors made the final scene convincing with the emotional force of their performances. Under Staller's supervision, the Pearl's cast does justice to the wit of Major Barbara but seldom conveys the raw feeling that ought to animate the brainy talk. Without that, there's no accepting the conviction of Barbara and Adolphus that they can save the world by forsaking charity and classical learning for the armaments industry.
Major Barbara is playing through December 14 at the Pearl Theatre Co. (555 West 42nd St.). Performances are Tuesday at 7 p.m.; Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday at 2 p.m.; and Thursday–Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets are $65 for regular admission; $39 for seniors; and $20 for students and rush Thursday. For tickets, please visit pearltheatre.org or by call 212-563-9261.
The Pearl Theatre Company, which occupies a fine modern facility on West 42nd Street near 11th Avenue, has selected Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, in a translation by the late Paul Schmidt, to open its 2014–15 season. Subtitled “Scenes from Country Life,” this comedy—or, rather, this special, melancholy kind of comedy—is one of four major plays the dramatist wrote near the end of his relatively short life.
The characters of Uncle Vanya are recognizable in their frustration and disappointment; their bickering and folly are readily believable. Though short on plot, the text is rich in dialogue and subtext. It's a beloved and influential play, constantly revived all over the world. Recent American works such as Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike by Christopher Durang (the most produced script in professional theaters around the U.S. this season, according to American Theater magazine) and The Country House by Donald Margulies (newly opened at Broadway's Friedman Theatre) owe it a conspicuous debt. When Uncle Vanya returns to New York, attention must be paid.
The play takes place on a country estate run by Sonya (Michelle Beck) and her maternal uncle (Chris Mixon), the title character. Sonya's father, Alexander Serebriakov (Dominic Cuskern), is a vainglorious scholar whose career and vitality are winding down. Serebriakov's luxurious city existence has been financed by the hard work and frugal living of Sonya and Vanya on the farm. Arriving in the country for an open-ended stay, the professor and his much younger wife, Yelena (Rachel Botchan), interrupt the rhythms of country life. Their selfish, inconsiderate ways exacerbate resentments that have festered in the family for years; and Yelena's flirtatious allure leads to intrigue (or attempts at intrigue) and emotional havoc among males in the vicinity, especially Vanya and a family friend, Dr. Astrov (Bradford Cover).
The Pearl's production, directed by company artistic director Hal Brooks, is exquisite to behold. With movable pillars and fast traveling curtains, scenic designer Jason Simms transports the action efficiently from one room to another. A backdrop in soft colors, revealed when actors sweep the upstage curtains aside, brings the Russian countryside on stage; and Seth Reiser's expertly modulated lighting lends a sense of time passing from day to night and back to day at a languid pace appropriate to Chekhov.
This Uncle Vanya has no shortage of capable actors. Robin Leslie Brown brings intelligence and a light touch to the role of Marina, the old nurse who soothes shattered nerves and offers a long view of life. Cover's interpretation of Dr. Astrov is complex and arresting; his speech about reforestation is appropriate to the play's 19th-century setting yet sounds like something that might have been delivered at United Nations Climate Summit 2014 last month.
Mixon makes Vanya's disillusion palpable in the first two acts; but he plays the late scenes in a manic fashion that's anathema to Chekhov’s subtle brand of comedy and, at times, reminiscent of 1970s television sitcom. Other promising performances—Beck, Brad Heberlee as a neighbor nicknamed Waffles, and Carol Schultz as the foolish mother of the professor’s deceased first wife—suffer from direction that squeezes a sort of hilarity out of the script rather than trusting the playwright’s rueful humor. Botchan strikes the appropriate balance of insouciance and formidable stage presence for her role; but this Yelena seems to have wandered onto the Pearl stage from a play of later vintage than Uncle Vanya and from a different country than the other characters.
For a number of years, the Pearl has been one of the few companies in New York City consistently performing the so-called classical repertory of Western drama. The troupe’s tagline is “defining classics for New York,” and its work, whether up or down, is worth following. Uncle Vanya doesn't represent the Pearl anywhere near the top of its form; but next month the company, in tandem with the Gingold Theatrical Group, will present George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara, directed by David Staller. If Major Barbara has the style, pace, and Shavian spirit of last season's You Never Can Tell, audiences will undoubtedly forget the shortcomings of Uncle Vanya and may even line up to renew their Pearl subscriptions early.
Uncle Vanya is playing through Oct. 12 at the Pearl Theatre Co. (555 West 42nd St.). Running time 2 hours, 20 minutes with intermission. Performances are Tuesday at 7 p.m.; Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m.; and Thursday–Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets are $65, senior $39, student rush $20, Thursday rush $20, and may be purchased at pearltheatre.org or by calling 212-563-9261.
The Mint Theater, upstairs in a loft building on West 43rd St., pursues forgotten plays with the vigor of a dachshund digging for moles. Over the course of 18 years, this dogged Company has unearthed a surprising number of theatrical treasures buried by time, as well as a few mislaid scripts (but only a few) of primarily academic interest. Since the Mint's founding, the professionalism of its productions has risen steadily. The company is now among the foremost nonprofit theaters in New York City. Next month an audience of unprecedented magnitude will see this accomplished group's work when London Wall by John Van Druten, presented on-stage at the Mint last spring, is telecast as the inaugural episode of Theater Close-Up, a weekly series hosted by Sigourney Weaver on New York public broadcasters WNET and WLIW.
While waiting for its television debut, the Mint has unveiled a top-flight production of The Fatal Weakness, a 1946 comedy by George Kelly, directed by Jesse Marchese. Last year, the satiric Philip Goes Forth, another Kelly revival at the Mint, was noteworthy for acting and design; the play itself proved more historically intriguing than dramatically satisfying. In The Fatal Weakness, sprightly, intelligent dialogue and engaging turns of plot overcome the liability of Kelly's sluggish, old-fashioned exposition. Even in its less engaging moments, The Fatal Weakness is an ideal vehicle for the Mint's two masters of high-comedy style, Kristin Griffith and Cynthia Darlow.
In the 1920s, Kelly graduated from vaudeville (for which he wrote popular sketches) to Broadway, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for Craig's Wife. Though frequently satiric and always concerned with the follies of the American middle and upper-middle classes, Kelly's plays are too varied to be summed up in a phrase. The Fatal Weakness is an urbane comedy of manners which was presented originally by The Theatre Guild in 1946 with the great comic actress Ina Claire in the leading role. It played 119 performances, a respectable Broadway run for a non-musical play in those days and sufficient to recoup the producers' investment. Kelly was 63 when the play closed; he survived another 27 years, but The Fatal Weakness was his last new work on Broadway. Except for a 1976 television adaptation, introduced by Kelly’s famous niece, Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco, The Fatal Weakness has hardly been seen since it closed on Broadway in 1947.
The heroine of The Fatal Weakness, Ollie Espenshade (Griffith), is the kind of mid-century matron who would have been susceptible to the happily-ever-after hype surrounding the nuptials of George Kelly's movie-star niece to Rainier III, Prince of Monaco. (That much-chronicled event took place less than a decade after the play's premiere.) Ollie's "fatal weakness" is a combination of sentimental heart and romantic imagination. After 28 years of marriage, she has discovered that husband Paul is having an affair with an osteopath (an off-stage character). As one might expect, Ollie is incensed. When her busybody friend Mabel Wentz (Darlow) procures details of Paul's clandestine activities, Ollie's fancy shifts into high gear; and, as Ollie's rose-tinted imagination transforms Paul and the osteopath into Abelard and Heloise, The Fatal Weakness barrels forward on an unexpected narrative route.
Griffith makes Ollie's extravagant unworldliness endearing and, for the most part, credible. Marchese has surrounded her with actors who have a knack for Kelly's kind of urbane, out-of-kilter comedy. In addition to Darlow (a consummate, poker-faced comedian), the cast includes Cliff Bemis as the wayward husband, Victoria Mack as the unsympathetic daughter, Penny, and Sean Patrick Hopkins as the bewildered son-in-law, Vernon. Patricia Kilgarriff wrings maximal humor from the role of a parlor maid whose purpose in the script is largely, perhaps exclusively, expository. Garbed in handsome costumes by Andrea Varga (including, most notably, lavish frocks and lounging attire for Griffith), the cast cavorts around a richly detailed drawing room, designed by Vicki R. Davis (with period-appropriate bric-a-brac and props provided by Joshua Yocom). The single stage set, which received a round of applause when the curtains first parted at a recent performance, features high reflective panels that ought to be distracting but, in fact, contribute a dazzling visual effect to the scenic design throughout the evening.
The Fatal Weakness belongs in the company of those distinctively American high comedies written between the World Wars by Kelly's contemporaries Philip Barry (The Philadelphia Story) and S.N. Behrman (No Time for Comedy). Kelly's plays have fallen out of sight to a degree that Barry's and Behrman's have not. With several more Kelly plays ripe for revival, the Mint may redress that situation in seasons to come. In the meantime, New York audiences are learning that there's more to George Kelly's story than that famous niece.
The Fatal Weakness was scheduled to play through Oct. 26 but has now been extended through November 2, 2014, at the Mint Theater Company (311 West 43rd St.). Running time is 2 hours and 20 minutes. Performances are 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday; 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, and 2 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. There is a special matinee at 2 p.m. on Oct. 15 and no performance on Oct. 14. Tickets are $55 and $27.50 and may be purchased at www.minttheater.org or by calling 866-811-4111.
A press release for the Puppet Shakespeare Players’ Puppet Titus Andronicus announces, first and foremost, that one of the show's producers is Dee Snider of Twisted Sister fame. As though that's not eye-catching enough, the press release hails this production as a “fresh, comedic take on Shakespeare’s ‘worst’ play.” Whether Titus Andronicus may fairly be dismissed as the “worst” play in the Bard’s canon is matter for debate; but this early tragedy is undoubtedly Shakespeare's most gruesome. So filled with horrors is the plot that Charles and Mary Lamb omitted it from their classic collection of Shakespearean tales for young readers.
Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus, perhaps in collaboration with George Peele, near the beginning of his career and possibly as early as 1591. The lurid plot, chockablock with adultery, murder, rape, dismemberment, and cannibalism, follows the tradition of Renaissance revenge tragedy. Many years after Titus, Shakespeare would transform the materials of English revenge drama into Hamlet, the most masterful revenge play of all time. Titus, with dramatic construction as gangly and ill-coordinated as an 11-year-old kid, shows little indication that this fledgling playwright is the genius of Hamlet. It's not hard to understand why the youthful, energetic Puppet Shakespeare Players approach Titus Andronicus with a lack of reverence.
In creating Titus, Shakespeare relied on several sources, most notably Ovid’s story of Philomela and her sister Procne, wife of King Tereus of Thrace. Tereus rapes Philomela and excises her tongue to prevent her disclosing what has happened. Philomela outsmarts Tereus by chronicling her misfortune in a tapestry and sending it to Procne. The sisters get revenge by killing Tereus’s son and serving his flesh, disguised in a culinary treat, to the unwitting father. Ovid’s tale ends in metamorphosis: when Tereus tries to kill the sisters, all three are transformed into birds. Shakespeare's tragedy utilizes the elements of Ovid's tale minus the mystical conclusion.
Events in Titus Andronicus are so unrelentingly gruesome that imaginative stagings have often repelled play-goers. When Lucy Bailey’s production opened at Shakespeare’s Globe on the South Bank of the Thames earlier this year, the London Times reported that “the stage blood and mutilation” were “so realistic” that “spectators were dropping like flies.” Under Ryan Rinkel's direction, Puppet Shakespeare's Titus substitutes whimsy for horror. Adam Weppler employs appropriate swagger as Titus, the brilliant military strategist devoid of talent for life on the home front; and Sarah Villegas lends similar extravagance to the role of Tamora, wily Queen of the Goths, who wreaks havoc when brought to Rome as part of Titus's spoils of war. But the humans of this Titus Andronicus are upstaged by their fuzzy puppet colleagues. The real stars of the piece are the villain, Aaron the Boar (Aaron the Moor in Shakespeare's original), agilely manipulated by puppeteer A.J. Coté, and ingénue Lavinia, animated with remarkable vigor by puppeteer Mindy Leanse.
This production of Titus dispenses with Shakespeare's first act, summarizing the action in a hip-hop inflected song. Much of what remains in the abbreviated text of this Titus is lost in haphazard declamation or chaotic staging. The Puppet Shakespeare adaptation consists largely of loathsome acts perpetrated on charming, Henson-esque puppets. The incongruous combination of gore and charming, plush creatures is arguably a commentary — rudimentary commentary, but commentary nonetheless — on the overheated materials of Renaissance revenge tragedy.
At some moments during the show's two hours, it's tempting to speculate that Shakespeare, who was always mindful of the groundlings, might applaud the ribaldry of Puppet Shakespeare's take on Titus Andronicus. But it's pointless to rely on Puppet Shakespeare for anything in the way of insight about the Bard or the nature of tragedy. The slapstick of their Titus is relentless; the actors have at their disposal an abundance of silly string, which is supposed to be puppet puke. That's enough to keep most of the audience in stitches all evening.
Puppet Titus Andronicus, inspired by William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, presented by The Puppet Shakespeare Players and STT Productions/Dee Snider at the Beckett Theatre (410 West 42nd Street) ran until August 16.
The Public Theater presentation of Much Ado About Nothing, with a starry cast performing in the bucolic setting of Central Park's Delacorte Theater, is likely to be among New York City's most sought after tickets. Up at the 133rd Street Arts Center, What Dreams May Co. Theatre and Queens Players are currently offering another Much Ado, hardly publicized but well worth a visit. In a perfectly ordered New York City, the masses of would-be theatergoers who fail to score seats for Much Ado in the Park (and those unwilling to sacrifice a day to waiting in line for free tickets) would find their way to Harlem to see the handiwork of 14 unknown actors, directed by Nicole Schalmo, in a tiny, second-floor auditorium with a minimum of scenery and equipment.
Much Ado About Nothing is a rowdy mixture of the silly and the serious. The central plot comes from classical Greek literature via 16th-century Italian sources — Ludovico Ariosto and Matteo Bandello — and Edmund Spenser's English epic The Faerie Queene. The story concerns Claudio (Gregg Ellson), just home from war, who spurns his bride, Hero (Christina Sheehan), at the altar. Hero is virtuous, but circumstantial evidence, contrived by the toxic Don John (Jonathan Emerson), suggests otherwise; and Claudio has been taken in by Don John's scheme. Hearing Claudio's harsh accusations, Hero faints away; her father, Leonato (Rafael Svarin), claiming she's dead, concocts a plan to clear her name and punish Claudio's arrogance. Things are dire until a band of bumbling rustics — constable Dogberry (Kenny Fedorko), his sidekick Verges (Nathan Beagle), and two officers of the municipal watch (Kate Fallon and Meghan Blakeman) — unwittingly thwart Don John's conspiracy.
There isn't much that's plausible about the misunderstanding between Claudio and Hero or what follows it; and, based on that implausibility, W.H. Auden has declared that Much Ado is "not one of Shakespeare's best plays." Yet throughout the past four centuries, this relatively dark comedy has been a crowd-pleaser. Its popularity is due, in large measure, to the subplot in which Hero's cousin Beatrice (Aimee Marcelle) and Benedick (Gonzalo Trigueros), a military comrade of Claudio, are tricked into falling in love with each other. The opinionated, sharp-tongued Benedick and Beatrice are among Shakespeare's most vivid creations; and Auden aptly describes them as “the characters of Shakespeare we’d most like to sit next to at dinner.”
The youthful cast handles both verse and prose with confidence and brio. Fedorko, adept at low Shakespearean comedy, makes Dogberry a highlight of the proceedings. Emerson, a forceful, nuanced Macduff in the What Dreams May Co. Macbeth last December, does what he can to lend verisimilitude to a one-dimensional role; his Don John is an exuberantly villainous cartoon, enormous fun to watch but inexplicably malevolent.
As in most productions of Much Ado, the evening belongs to Beatrice and Benedick. Shakespeare uses the reluctant lovers as tools to skewer the conventions of courtly love; Marcelle and Trigueros (presumably guided by Schalmo) ensure that Beatrice and Benedick are always emotionally complex and convincing. Marcelle is a striking comedic presence, compellingly vivacious without upstaging her compatriots. She's well-matched in raillery and romantic chemistry by Trigueros's Benedick. The pair navigate a credible, touching transformation from prickliness to devotion.
In addition to being the production's director, Schalmo is responsible for costumes and, with Emerson, for the lighting design. She has transferred the action of the play from Renaissance Messina to a small town in the American Midwest. This conceit, applied with a light touch, works very well for a story of deception, backbiting and intrigue; and it frees the actors of anxiety about speaking Shakespeare's lines in their natural accents.
Schalmo and her self-assured cast keep the action moving at a swift, consistent pace and make the most of the modest dimensions of the 133rd Street Arts Center stage. With no design fripperies to distract the audience, the production is focused throughout on the humor and beauty of the Bard's text. The simplicity of this Much Ado turns out to be a formidable asset.
Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare, presented by What Dreams May Co. Theatre, in association with Queens Players at the 133rd Street Arts Center (308 West 133rd St. between St. Nicholas Ave. and Frederick Douglass Blvd. in Harlem), runs Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Saturdays and Sundays at 3 p.m. through June 21. Tickets: $18. For tickets, visit www.brownpapertickets.com/event/495842 or call 1-800-838-3006.
For more than three decades, New York Theatre Workshop has nurtured cutting-edge dramatists such as Harry Kondoleon, Caryl Churchill, Tony Kushner, and Athol Fugard. The company introduced Rent to the world in 1995; but, only in recent seasons have musicals -- Once, Peter and the Starcatcher, A Civil War Christmas, and the innovative revue What’s It All About? Bacharach Reimagined -- become a major aspect of NYTW's artistic profile. The current offering, Red-Eye to Havre de Grace, is an eccentric music-theater piece about Edgar Allan Poe's last days. Although credited to an authorial committee of six, Red-Eye to Havre de Grace has a singular theatrical style that's as bracing as any of the music-theater pieces mentioned above.
The six people who have “created” Red-Eye to Havre de Grace are the show’s director and scenic designer (Thaddeus Phillips), its choreographer (Sophie Bortolussi), the actor who plays Poe (Ean Sheehy), siblings who composed the musical score (David and Jeremy Wilhelm), and Geoff Sobelle (listed merely as “co-creator”). Jeremy Wilhelm handles multiple roles, sings and plays guitar and clarinet; David Wilhelm is the production’s pianist. The sole performer not credited as an author is Alessandra L. Larson, who dances the ghostly role of Poe’s wife Virginia.
Poe, a master of the literary macabre and, arguably, the first professional writer in American history, died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849. Forty years old and a resident of the Bronx, he had been traveling during the preceding weeks, giving lectures and readings, searching for literary work, raising money for a journal he intended to start and, possibly, laying the groundwork for a move to Virginia. After stops in Boston, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Norfolk, Poe boarded the wrong train and arrived in Maryland by mistake. His confusion may have been a function of illness or of alcohol or laudanum (both of which figure prominently in his biography).
Red-Eye to Havre de Grace opens with a prologue spoken by a man (Jeremy Wilhelm) who introduces himself as Steve Reynolds, “a ranger for the United States National Park Service stationed at the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia.” Ranger Steve is in New York, he says, to give audiences a little background on Poe. His speech, which captures the enthusiasm of an obsessive docent, covers Poe's origins, his turbulent personal life, the variety of his literary output, and his desperate hopes for Eureka, the metaphysical treatise “which he believed to be his greatest work, in which he offered the full explanation of the origin and annihilation of the universe.”
The goofy, satiric quality of Ranger Steve's prologue puts the audience on notice that Red-Eye to Havre de Grace is no common-and-garden docu-drama. The scenes that follow draw on Poe's verse and prose, including letters and a mystifying passage from Eureka. The authors of the play don’t strain to link effects to causes, choosing instead to dramatize in visual and musical terms the grief that consumed Poe following the death of his very young wife (who was also his cousin) and his anxiety about how to promote his literary career while supporting himself and the mother-in-law (also his aunt) whom he adored.
Red-Eye to Havre de Grace is a succession of provocative images rather than straightforward narrative. Scenic designer (and director) Phillips and lighting designer Drew Billiau provide a visually arresting environment through which the actors navigate the complex movements of Phillips' direction and Bortolussi's nearly mesmerizing choreography. The direction and design are enhanced by the Wilhelm brothers' beautiful, varied musical score. Rosemarie McKelvey's simple, picturesque costumes contribute a great deal to the visual effect of the piece, as well.
For 90 minutes, the actors of Red-Eye to Havre de Grace, enact Poe's turbulent emotions and disintegrating intellect with engaging theatricality. The authors wisely avoid reaching for explanations of things that are lost in the interstices of the historical record. Red-Eye to Havre de Grace may do little to dispel the mystery of Poe's last days, but the authors and actors shed considerable light on what it means to strive and hope and grieve.
Red-Eye to Havre de Grace is running through Sunday, June 1, 2014, at New York Theatre Workshop (79 East 4th St.). Performances are 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Wednesday and Sunday; 8 p.m. on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday; 3 p.m. on Saturday; and 2 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets are $85, $40, and discounted to student groups of 10 or more. Ticket information at www.nytw.org or by calling 212-279-4200.
Until the 20th century was three-quarters spent, television and movies were strictly censored. Writers in those media pulled their punches, skirting tough social issues and playing naïve on matters of sex and politics. But playwrights didn’t face nearly as many content restrictions as their colleagues in film and TV, and audiences went to the theater for grown-up entertainment.
In an era of rigid content taboos, dramatist John Van Druten (1901-1957) supplied Broadway with intelligent plays in which characters talked forthrightly and with wit about the things that made Hollywood censors squirm. The English-born Van Druten, who became an American citizen in 1944, may not have been a household name, but many of his beautifully crafted plays – among them, Old Acquaintance, The Voice of the Turtle, and Bell, Book and Candle – enjoyed long engagements in New York and were performed all around the United States. He lives on, most prominently, in Cabaret, the endlessly revived musical and landmark Bob Fosse film, based on his comedy-drama, I Am a Camera (which, in turn, was based on The Berlin Stories of Van Druten’s good friend, Christopher Isherwood). This winter New York is having a sort of Van Druten fest, beginning with the Mint Theater Company’s engaging revival of London Wall, an unjustly mislaid West End play from 1931 (to be followed by the Transport Group’s all-female revival of I Remember Mama, which opens March 30).
Van Druten studied law and clerked for a firm of solicitors before transforming himself into a full-time writer. London Wall takes place in a law firm; and the play’s title refers to a thoroughfare in the City of London where the office is located. On the evidence of London Wall, it’s safe to say that Van Druten observed the inhabitants of the legal world, especially the women, with care and empathy. The play depicts four typists, employed at a pittance, with little prospect for social mobility other than fortuitous marriage. These women are of different ages with differing romantic prospects.
The hardboiled Miss Janus (Julia Coffey) has invested 10 years in her job and seven in an unrewarding relationship with a low-level Dutch diplomat. She's fed up with the law firm and on thin ice with her beau. Pat Milligan (Elise Kibler) is a 19-year-old, alone in the world, just entering the workforce. Miss Janus, a graduate of the School of Hard Knocks, wants to steer Pat away from the fates of Miss Hooper (Alex Trow), a dewy-eyed romantic who may be putting too much trust in a married man, and Miss Bufton (Katie Gibson), a good-time girl who's about to age out of the romance market.
In addition to the typists, London Wall involves two lawyers – Mr. Walker (Jonathan Hogan), the firm’s senior partner, and the much younger Mr. Brewer (Stephen Plunkett), a roué who can’t stop himself hitting on newly hired typists. The cast is filled out by a client, the exasperatingly eccentric Miss Willesden (Laurie Kennedy); an office boy, Birkenshaw (Matthew Gumley); and Hec (Christopher Sears), who is employed elsewhere in the building and is besotted with Pat.
The plot of London Wall includes some creaky, old-fashioned turns, but these are outweighed by Van Druten's elegant, believable dialogue and his intricately drawn characters. Under the able direction of Davis McCallum (lauded last season for The Whale at Playwrights Horizons), the cast of nine forms a remarkably balanced ensemble. The actors, most of whom are American, navigate the distinctly British text and its antiquated locutions with assurance and dialectal consistency. Amy Stoller, the Mint's long-time dialect coach, deserves special recognition.
Scenic designer Marion Williams has created a sturdy, eye-appealing set that the actors reconfigure between scenes to move the action swiftly from one room in the firm to another. Joshua Yocom has found period props, including antique telephones and telephone switchboard, that enhance the production's verisimilitude. And Nicole Pearce's lighting plot contributes significantly to the professionalism of the enterprise. To find fault with the Mint's London Wall, one would have to quibble about a couple of bad wigs. And who cares about the occasional bad wig?
London Wall is running through April 26 at the Mint Theater Company (311 West 43rd St.). Performances are 7 p.m. on Wednesday and Thursday, and 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, and 2 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. Tickets are $55 and can be purchased at www.minttheater.org or by calling 866-811-4111.
