Only three years after James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause depicted the
free-floating anxieties and unrest of the American teenager, Shelagh Delaney offered a female answer
on the other side of the Atlantic in A Taste of Honey. But, while Dean’s
youth feels insular (unwelcome at his new high school, unable to respect a
father he regards as emasculated by his mother), the protagonist of Delaney’s
play, Jo, steps way out of her comfort zone.
“There's no one like me…and don't you forget it!” Jo
tells a new friend. By the end of the play, audiences have no reason to doubt
that this curious, intelligent, spirited girl is all of that, and more.
But there is a real question whether Jo will be able
to carve out a better life for herself than her 40-year-old mother Helen, who
bounces from flat to flat and from lover to lover. The adolescent, following an
affair with a black sailor who left town without Jo telling him she’s pregnant,
is now facing a future with a biracial child in a racist society, with nobody
to depend on and nothing but her wits to live on.
Before sociologists began to speak about “the
culture of poverty,” Delaney was, back in 1958, depicting the constricted
environment and sometimes self-defeating behavior underlying it—and, remarkably
enough, she did this with searing insight in this, her first play, written when
she was only 18.
In this production from the Pearl Theatre, scenic designer Harry Feiner gives pictorial life to this dreary environment through a backdrop of crowded houses beneath a gray miasma—strongly
suggesting Delaney’s sooty hometown of Salford, an industrial community in
northern England, near Manchester. As if that weren’t enough, there is the
dialogue (“That river, it’s the colour of lead. Look at the washing, it’s
dirty, and look at those filthy children.”)
Wanting to break from everything Helen represents,
Jo reaches out to those well outside the accepted norms of the time: to the
black sailor, Jimmy (given beguiling life by Ade Otukoya) and, when she elects
to go on her own, to Geoffrey, whose gay lifestyle has made him an outcast and
nomad and needing companionship and friendship as much as Jo. But relationships
are temporary and provisional, and Delaney, while leaving her heroine a margin
of hope, also is at pains to demonstrate the odds facing her.
A
Taste of Honey was directed with considerable aplomb by
Austin Pendleton, who, as I
discussed in a post earlier this week,
simultaneously guided another British Fifties import to an estimable
Off-Broadway run: N.C. Hunter’s A Day by
the Sea, from the Mint Theater Co.
While both plays mix drama and comedy, their
worldviews, stagecraft and resulting challenges to companies reviving
them differ dramatically. Hunter’s characters are primarily the
upper-middle-class, speaking naturalistic dialogue, in tones of intensely
repressed regret; Delaney’s are working-class, ready with a bitter accusation (“The
time to have taken care of me was years ago, when I couldn’t take care of
myself," Jo tells her mother) or sharply cynical humor (Jo, again to her
mother: “You don't look forty. You look a sort of well-preserved sixty.”)
Hunter’s Chekhovian dramedy bears all the hallmarks
of the “well-made play” prevalent to that time; Delaney, on the other hand,
with her characters’ alienation and defiance of social norms, belongs to what
was sometimes termed the “kitchen sink realistic” movement of the late 1950s
and early 1960s. As it happened, both writers never achieved the same level of
success that they had in the Fifties (though Delaney, who died only five years
ago, still turned out the occasional screenplay and radio play well into her
sixties--including a 1961 adaptation of A Taste of Honey directed by Tony Richardson and starring Rita Tushingham as Jo).
Delaney’s script has been well-served by a talented
quintet of actors. In addition to Otukoya, these include John Evans Reese as
Geoffrey; Pearl Theatre vets Rachel Botchan and Bradford Cover as,
respectively, Helen and her alcoholic, womanizing lover Peter; and especially Rebekah
Brockman as Jo.
Off to the side of the stage (and, at points, even
stepping into the action), a trio of musicians play jazz tunes, most
notably—what else?—Herb Alpert’s “A Taste of Honey.” It is the same bit of stagecraft
employed by the original director of the show, Joan Littlewood, in Great
Britain, employing musical shorthand to evoke those who, like Jo, Jimmy and
Geoffrey, are beyond category—and certainly beyond the norms of their time.
Delaney's work--even this most famous of them all--does not show up very much in the U.S. these days. Those who haven't seen this production of what is generally deemed her best would be well-advised to catch it before it closes on Sunday.
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