Reviews by Glenda Frank
2010
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OVO - at Randall's IslandA Cirque du Soleil production under the blue-and gold Grand Chapiteau at Randall's Island. Directed by Deborah Colker. |
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GLENDA FRANK in LIMA, PERU
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PLAYS INTERNATIONAL
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2009
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PLAYS INTERNATIONAL (pdf)
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PLAYS INTERNATIONAL
For 16 years, Santiago, Chile, has been hosting an exciting month-long international theatre festival. This year 53 productions were staged in 21 venues scattered throughout the downtown area. |
PLAYS INTERNATIONAL: SEPT. 2010
Summer in New York theatre is laid back and easy. The July hit was Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park. The production will move to Broadway in November. In late spring, Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson, a rowdy rock musical by Alex Timbers (book and direction) and Michael Friedman (music and lyrics) about the seventh president (1829–1837), played to great acclaim at the Public Theatre and will open at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre this October. The 2010 New York International Fringe Festival with its 197 shows and the many other summer festivals that showcase new work are winding down. But one small off-Broadway theatre keeps its steady keel year round.
Jonathan Bank, a slim, bookish man, does not look like a revolutionary. But for the past 15 years he has been on a mission -- to rescue neglected plays and playwrights. As the Artistic Director of the Mint Theatre at 311 W. 43 St., he produces, directs and publishes forgotten gems. A subscription audience is his safety net, but more and more people are adding his season to their must-see lists.
This summer has been particularly auspicious. On July 29, the Mint Theatre opened the New York premiere of Wife to James Whelan, a 1942 drama by Teresa Deevy (1894-1963). The play was so well received that the run was quickly extended to Oct. 3. Wife to James Whelan is the first installation of the Teresa Deevy project. It will be followed by a production of Deevy’s play Temporal Powers, a videorecording of both shows as well as readings of several of her one-act plays, most notably the once-heralded King of Spain’s Daughter, about a poor girl who retreats to fantasies until she is forced to choose between a loveless marriage and a factory job. In the works is a Deevy conference hosted by New York and Fordham universities and the publication of her collected works. Earlier this year Bank visited the Deevy home and discovered a treasure trove of unpublished plays.
Who is this woman? And what about her work deserves all this attention? In 1994 The Irish Times identified Deevy as “one of the most undeservedly neglected and significant Irish playwrights of the 20th Century." From 1930-1936 the Abbey Theatre in Dublin produced six of her plays, which were concurrently published in English and American magazines. A change in managing directors at the Abbey kept Deevy off their short list. A splinter group, unhappy with the new policies, added her to their program, but ran out of funds before their second season.
Deevy, the youngest of 13 children, fought her way out of many a setback. At 20, a student at University College, Dublin, she lost her hearing to Meniere’s disease. When she was sent to London to study lip-reading, she fell in love with theatre, and returned home a playwright. Despite the Abbey disappointment, she wrote over a dozen plays for the B.B.C. and Éireann radio, supervising rehearsals by reading the actors’ lips. In Dublin, she and her sister Nell hosted a lively salon. After Nell’s death in 1954, she returned to Waterford and became one of the town’s eccentrics, a skinny woman wearing mismatched socks and strange hats, riding her bike along the highway “with the nonchalance of a girl cycling along a country lane,” one observer wrote.
Her biography is colourful but equally engaging is Wife to John Whelan. The play is a portrait of a self-made man with a love story woven in. The women, recognizable types, are rendered with a sure, sensitive hand. Their unique qualities are brought out in their interactions with Whelan. The play is filled with unexpected turns.
Act I opens slowly. Whelan (Shawn Fagan), a young labourer, has snagged a plum job in Dublin, but Nan Bowers (Janie Brookshire), his wilful fiancée, is furious. He did not consult her, and she insists he remain Kilbeggan. He needs to improve his chances, he tells her, for her and for himself. If he had the opportunity of another Kilbeggan man, who has secured work with his uncle’s bus service, he would transform it into a money tree. Nan, who is popular, finds a new suitor immediately and breaks with Whelan.
In the second act, set several years later, Whelan’s loneliness and ambition are palpable. He is the founder of the small Silver Wings Motor Services in Kilbeggan, ready to make its first run. He has hired his old buddies, who offer what seems like sound business advice, which he shrugs off indifferently. Kate (Rosie Benton), a loyal friend, still tries to boss him around, and they discuss how they could never marry. Nora (Liv Rooth), rich, lovely, and very young, visits, courting him. He is suspicious and arrogance. I’m a good catch, he reminds her. But we’re not suited for each other. Nan returns. A debt-ridden widow with a child, she offers to scrub floors. Still infatuated, he offers her the front office, double salary, and control of company finances. He lends her a pound in advance. Tempted by the cash on his desk, she steals from him. He retrieves the money, and his employees urge forgiveness, but he calls the police, knowing she will be jailed.
His inner turmoil grows stronger in Act III. He was right to reject his employees’ advice. The company has bested its rival handily. Nan returns and he hires her again -- to scrub floors, but she has a tale to tell about abuse. Without hesitating, he challenges her abuser in the street and trounces him. Battered and bruised, he returns to his office to find Nora waiting, and he reaches a decision. Wife to John Whelan is a powerful, haunting play, less of its time than about contemporary life and the choices we make.
A mission to advocate for obscure plays and authors doesn’t sound promising if you want a successful theatre. Why would Jonathan Bank, who directed Wife to John Whelan, invest in such a venture? Trained as an actor, he knew he wanted to direct, but plays that are plot-driven, Aristotelian, rather than contemporary drama. Creating directorial slants, which is the temptation for staging classics, didn’t appeal to him. I like stories, he said, where you don’t know how the play will end. There’s a surprise.
Perhaps it is no surprise to him how well the theatre has been received. In presenting the Mint with a 2002 Special Drama Desk Award, critic Ed Karam observed that “most of the plays staged by the Mint have lain on the shelf more than 41 years . . . There are interesting stories behind the obscurity of each of these dramas, and often the reason has nothing to do with the writing.”
The Mint Theatre may be outgrowing its space. Last season Bank directed Maurine Dallas Watkins’ So Help Me God!, a riotous backstage comedy, at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in Greenwich Village. Kristen Johnston (two Emmy (TV) Awards for Third Rock from the Sun) starred as the imperious star who battles an ambitious understudy by cowing her scheming producer, frightened playwright, cast and crew into compliance. The play received four Drama Desk nominations, rivalling its Broadway competition.
In discovering neglected gems, Bank has given new voice to many women playwrights who were well-known in their day: Susan Glaspell, Zona Gale, Dawn Powell, Rose Franken, and Rachel Crothers. Some critically acclaimed Mint treasures include the New York premieres of Harley Granville-Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance and novelist Thomas Wolfe’s Welcome To Our City; a revival of A.A. Milne's Mr. Pim Passes By; and Edith Wharton's unpublished dramatization of The House of Mirth. I was particularly pleased to see Ernest Hemingway’s The Fifth Column and D.H. Lawrence’s The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, dramas I didn’t know existed. By trusting that these plays and playwright deserve a second act, the Mint Theatre has made itself an indispensable part of New York theatre.
BROADWAY LISTINGS: The Addams Family, Lunt-Fontane Theatre; American Idiot, St. James; Billy Elliot: The Musical, Imperial; Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson, Bernard B. Jacobs; Brief Encounter, Studio 54; Chicago the Musical, Ambassador; Driving Miss Daisy, Golden; Fela!, Eugene O’Neill; In the Heights, Richard Rodgers; Jersey Boys, August Wilson; La Bete, Music Box; La Cage aux Folles, Longacre; A Life in the Theatre, Schoenfeld; The Lion King, Minskoff; A Little Night Music, Walter Kerr; Lombardi, Circle in the Square; Mamma Mia!, Winter Garden; Mary Poppins, New Amsterdam; Memphis: A New Musical, Shubert; Million Dollar Quartet, Nederlander; Mrs. Warren’s Profession, American Airlines; Next to Normal, Booth; The Phantom of the Opera, Majestic; The Pitmen Painters, Samuel J. Friedman; Promises, Promises, Broadway; Rain - A Tribute to the Beatles on Broadway, Neil Simon; Rock of Ages, Brooks Atkinson; The Scottsboro Boys, Lyceum; Time Stands Still, Cort; West Side Story, Palace; Wicked, Gershwin.