Theater Review: Elizabeth Baker’s ‘Partnership,’ at New York’s Mint Theater

Like many New York area theatergoers, I have been slow getting back to Broadway and Off-Broadway shows even as the dangers of COVID-19 have receded without fully disappearing. Before March 2020, I had sometimes taken in a couple of shows a month. 

What a difference the pandemic made! This past spring’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House starring Jessica Chastain was the first I had attended in three years, and it satisfied my curiosity about this much-discussed show without making me entirely glad I had spent so much for a small-scale production.

I felt much better after seeing the latest Off-Broadway production by the Mint Theater. The third and last installment in a trilogy by English playwright Elizabeth Baker (1876-1962), Partnership, which closed this weekend, accomplished what the company has done so successfully so often throughout its nearly 30 years of existence: bring to light past dramas and comedies that have slipped, often unjustly, into the mists of history.

Superficially, Baker delivered what audiences in the WWI era (and, actually, ours) craved: a wry, gentle romantic comedy. But not for her the drawing-room comedy genre that made Oscar Wilde, Somerset Maugham, and Noel Coward the toast of the West End.

Instead, in class-conscious Britain, in 13 plays over two decades, she limned the aspirations of middle-class strivers—especially women who, against all odds, were trying to gain a foothold in a male-dominated business world. 

Even as the government was confronting the challenge of suffragettes, Baker was posing questions even more fundamental than politics to women: without men, how they could expect to survive on their own, and what might they have to sacrifice to achieve a life without want? And, looking beyond that, what constituted a fulfilled life?

Herself a member of the aspiring class (a stenographer and typist who imbibed dramatic construction by typing the works of fashionable playwrights of the day), Baker was a realist rather than a romantic. She found little poetic in the lives of characters wholly invested in the struggle for personal autonomy.  But she was honest in depicting characters too little seen on the stages of her time.

Partnership, first staged in England in 1917 (with future film great Ronald Colman playing a bit part), is a good example of her stagecraft and concerns, and it gets a second wind here in the United States under the direction of Jackson Grace Gay.

Kate Rolling, along with her sharp and saucy friend and second-in-command Maisie Glow, is making a go of it in her small fashionable milliner’s shop in Brighton, even for a demanding clientele. The attractive and successful young women are also getting attention from male suitors, with the two received a combined four marriage proposals in the past four weeks.

Then Kate receives, from the owner of the largest store in town, yet another, but this time with a twist a business and personal merger proposal: a suggestion, from an especially acquisitive businessman who’s just bought the property next door, that the two combine forces in a partnership that would allow Kate to expand. 

Part of the arrangement—already spelled out in a formal contract by the enterprising George Pillatt—is that Kate marry him.

Pillatt can’t imagine how anything could matter more to a businessperson than the slightest opportunity to make another sale. Any woman accepting his hand in marriage could be assured of a financially secure future, but hardly a warm and happy one.

For a while, it seems that this marriage of convenience is enough for Kate. But when she accepts an invitation to visit the nearby “Downs” or hills from free-spirited investor Lawrence Fawcett, she becomes of the possibility of a different lifestyle and different life companion.

All of this occurs in the face of an incredulous Pillatt and a frustrated Maisie, who advises her friend that if it’s romance and excitement she craves, she should have a man on the side.

Sara Haider has made her Off-Broadway debut an auspicious one. In accentuating how the intelligent, driven Kate Rolling finds herself unexpectedly intoxicated by the spirit of freedom and love, she has put herself on track for a future role as a self-possessed Shakespeare comic heroine like Rosalind and Portia. 

I wasn’t able to see Olivia Gilliatt’s performance in the Mint’s production last year of Baker’s Chains, but judging by her work here she appears to have a real affinity for the playwright, lending a winning spice and joie de vivre to a character who, in less capable hands, might have sounded simply dour and cynical.

The men fare less well, in admittedly more constricted roles. Gene Gillette at least heightens the stakes by depicting Pillatt as a businessman that one disappoints only at one’s peril, but Joshua Echebiri cannot achieve a natural evolution from the reticent Fawcett of early scenes to the more unbuttoned down at the Downs.

It should also be stated here that, though confined to a small space in New York’s Theater Row, the Mint has consistently used its limited resources imaginatively. In the current production, that is owing to scenic designer Alexander Woodward, who has adapted a James Hart Dyke painting into a beguiling backdrop suggesting the rolling green coastal landscape of the Downs that turns Kate’s head around.

Though it has also run less well-known plays by famous authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Noel Coward, D.H. Lawrence, and Leo Tolstoy, the Mint Theater has performed a particular service by mounting several productions by once-acclaimed dramatists who’ve fallen into obscurity (e.g., George Kelly) or who have never really enjoyed their moment in the sun (Teresa Deavy, N.C. Hunter).

 Elizabeth Baker belongs to the latter category, and it was good to see her Partnership receive its American premiere more than a century after it captivated London audiences got their first, fleeting glimpses of it.

Theater Review: ‘The Price of Thomas Scott,’ by Elizabeth Baker, from the Mint Theater Co.

I have expressed my admiration several times on this blog about The Mint Theater Company and its mission of uncovering unjustly neglected dramas of the past. But in its most recent production, The Price of Thomas Scott, which closed a week ago on New York’s Theater Row, I’m afraid that this plucky Off-Broadway troupe could not breathe life back into the inanimate body it came upon. 

In fact, I came away thinking that there might have been more off-stage curiosity and even drama in the life of this period piece’s English playwright, Elizabeth Baker, than in the play itself, which has not been produced since its original 1913 production.

The play is simple enough: After decades of running a drapery shop with increasingly dwindling profits, Thomas Scott can finally get out of the drudgery when an old acquaintance, Wicksteed, appears on his doorstep, offering to buy him out. 

Each of the rest of the Scott family, for reasons of their own, are eager for him to accept the offer: Wife Ellen wants to move to the suburbs; son Leonard, a promising student, could use the money to advance his education; and daughter Annie, sensing her flair for something more creative than the mostly mundane hats she trims in Thomas’ shop, wants to study fashion in Paris.

Unfortunately, Thomas, a Noncomformist, or non-Anglican Protestant, has very strict ideas about morality, including that dancing is sinful—and Wicksteed wants to turn the shop into a dance hall. Should Thomas take his money and not concern himself with what is done with the property—or stand on principle and dash his family’s dreams?

To her credit, Baker does not make Thomas Scott one-dimensional, as, for, instance, a playwright like the dogmatic Lillian Hellman might have done. And Banks and his cast have sensitively conveyed these characters’ hopes, hesitation, and disappointment in the fate they have been dealt. (A hurried, frenzied attempt at an in-house dance by Annie and her suitor, Johnny Tite, offers a welcome kinetic release, as well as an appropriate symbol of cultural rebellion.) But the characters swallow their various misgivings, so that the action never reaches the emotional climax one expects here.

Too often, reviewers write about a revived play they don’t like as being “dated.” I hate the term: it’s not only cliched but meaningless. (What, after all, is more “dated” than King Lear or Oedipus Rex?) 

But I’m not sure how the Mint company thought it could make contemporary and relevant the intensely religious Edwardian milieu of Thomas Scott to overwhelmingly secular Manhattanites of the 21^st century.

I would have welcomed the chance to learn more about the Noncomformists and the Liberal Party in Great Britain before World War I—a topic discussed by George Robb of William Paterson University in a post-show talk. Still, the post-performance lecture I attended, given by Maya Cantu, a member of the drama faculty at Bennington College and dramaturgical advisor to the Mint, was quite illuminating about Baker’s own life.

Like Annie Scott, Baker came from a strict religious background. Nor did her initial job in the workplace, as a shorthand clerk and typist, offer opportunities for what became a consuming creative interest: the theater.

Keenly observant, Baker quickly absorbed the conventions of the well-made theater of her time: sharp, realistic dialogue and unity of time and setting—facts reflected in the single setting and confined time period (two days) of The Price of Thomas Scott. 

For a while, the London press hailed her as a “widener of frontiers.” But after a final one-act play in 1932, she fell into obscurity, except for a few telecasts of her plays by Britain’s Four ITV Television Playhouse from 1959 to 1961.

 

This production will be the first of a projected three that the Mint company will mount of Baker's plays over the next two years. One hopes that Partnership and Chains will fulfill the promise and soften the flaws present in this initial entry in the “Meet Miss Baker” project.