Over the last several years that I have been
attending performances at the Off-Broadway venue The Mint Theater, I have never known it to take a misstep—until
now, with The Fatal Weakness, a comedy-drama that closed this past weekend.
Even in this case, the fault lies less with the cast or crew than with the
source material.
Last year, Philip
Goes Forth, another play by George Kelly, had triumphantly demonstrated how good the Mint could be in its
mission of reviving interest in unjustly neglected works. (See my post on that
occasion here.)
I had high hopes, then, for The Fatal Weakness, and not a little of interest. After all, it was
the last play by Kelly (a Pulitzer Prize winner for the 1920s drama Craig’s Wife, a playwright who, oddly enough, might
be better known today as “Grace’s Uncle”). How would the play work, I wondered?
As it turned out, not terribly well. Reviewers are
fond of writing that a play is “dated,” but that presupposes that audiences
found the material compelling at some point after it premiered. But The Fatal Weakness never really gained
traction, with critics or audiences, and its closing not long after its
November 1946 Broadway opening hastened Kelly’s retirement. Its conflicts and
themes haven’t dated with time—in fact, in certain ways, it feels like an
uncanny barometer of America’s moral future, in terms of how it viewed the marriage bond—but, for once, there are cracks in
Kelly’s dramatic masonry.
Perhaps the Mint saw in the play the same quality
that its original star, Ina Claire, and the star of a 1976 PBS telecast, Eva
Marie Saint, glimpsed: the opportunity for a middle-aged actress to shine, in a
role of some complexity. Upper-class Ollie Ospenshade, married nearly three
decades, is, as the play begins, afflicted with the “fatal weakness” of
incurable romanticism—so much so that one of her favorite pastimes has become
attending weddings, even those involving complete strangers.
Before long, it becomes clear that she may not be
altogether clear-sighted about a situation close to home. Best female friend and
perennial busybody Mabel Wentz has picked up scuttlebutt that Ollie’s husband
Paul might be two-timing Ollie. In some of the most farcical minutes of the
show, the two friends play amateur detective, conducting surveillance on Paul
to see if he is indeed going to the golf course, as he claims.
A subplot involves the Ospenshades’ daughter Penny,
a wife whose notions of proper marriage are being undermined by new pseudo-intellectual
fads. She is very much her father’s girl, making Ollie wonder how much of
Paul’s inclinations may have rubbed off on her.
The acting, as with prior Mint productions, is
first-rate. Cliff Bemis, so good as an unbending but upright father in Philip Goes Forth, does well with
another patriarch here, albeit one looser and more amiable. Victoria Mack makes
Penny a fascinating compound of boredom, privilege and half-baked pretension.
The Irish servant Anna becomes, in the hands of Patricia Kilgarriff, a droll
prism for audiences wondering how the affluent can be so foolish.
Nor does any fault for this production lie with
leading lady Kristin Griffith, who manages Ollie’s transition from
flibbertigibbet to mature woman—and the play’s swing from comedy to drama—with
manifest skill.
No, the fault with this comedy-drama lies not with
any of the cast, nor even with director Jesse Marchese, but with Kelly himself,
whose admirable attempts to circumvent clichéd contemporary views of marriage
were undermined by sudden lurches in tone, not to mention plot points that strain
credulity (e.g.,. a major transition in Ollie’s life transpires a dozen times
quicker than it ever could in real life).
No comments:
Post a Comment