Theater Review: A Prescient, and Newly Relevant, Warning About Fascism

For 30 years, the Mint Theater has specialized in rediscovering plays often unfairly confined to the dustbin of history. In my experience attending nearly 20 of these shows, I’ve found them lovingly and shrewdly presented.

But no production of this Off-Broadway company has struck me so powerfully as Crooked Cross, which has not been revived in the UK since its 1937 premiere at London’s Westminster Theatre—and not produced at all in the US till now.

This drama by British author Sally Carson about the rise of Nazism in the critical December 1932-summer 1933 period only runs through today, so many readers will not be able to see it before it closes.

Even so, I urge you to buy the 1934 novel that she herself expertly adapted, which Persephone Books republished this past April. And while you’re at it, buy another copy for friends still open to understanding its message for today—and, if Persephone gets around to reissuing them, its two sequels: The Prisoner (1936) and A Traveller Came By (1938).

The drama has turned up again at a time when, like Germany transitioning from the Weimar Republic, Americans are unsettled by economic dislocation and a relative loss of power in the world—and decide to embrace a nationalist leader willing to break norms and laws at lightning speed.

A publisher’s reader and dance teacher when the novel and play of Crooked Cross were created, Carson had little time to establish herself in the literary world. Starting a family in 1938, she died of breast cancer only three years later, only aged 38.

By that time, the world was so caught up in maelstrom of fighting the Axis powers that it forgot about the English Cassandra whose warnings were disregarded by a war-weary electorate and appeasers in Whitehall.

Crooked Cross starts like a Christmas romantic comedy, with Lexa Kluger, a vibrant twentysomething woman hanging ornaments with her parents, two brothers and her fiancée, Moritz Weissmann, in their Bavarian home.

Over nine scenes, the tone becomes more like a thriller or horror film, with lives at stake and darkness spreading over their picturesque mountain community of Kranach and their country.

Carson outlines, step by step, how large national events shatter this harmony. Moritz loses his promising job as a doctor in a prestigious hospital because of his Jewish background and teaching first aid to a Marxist audience. Moritz’s father is not only dismissed from his university job because of his religion but is seized and disappeared by the newly empowered Nazi regime.

The trends highlighted by Carson will seem all too familiar to many today:

*A suddenly restrictive border policy meant to punish a minority;
*A new government that uses the slenderest of pretexts to reduce opposition;
*Nationalist right-wing groups willing to overthrow the government;
*Universities that cravenly yield to government pressure.

But what will especially strike a chord with modern audiences is Carson’s psychological understanding of what gives rise to authoritarianism, and the divisions it causes in families.

The Klugers react differently over how to deal with the ascendant Nazi Party. Frau Kluger (played by Katie Firth) nags her husband into joining it. Their son Erich (played with chilling authority by Jakob Winter) embraces Hitler’s principles and strategies with fanatical devotion, while second brother Helmy (Gavin Michaels), though closer to Lexa and Mauritz, swallows his ambivalence in the hope that the party will provide income and a purpose that’s been missing from his life.

Lexa will have none of this. She struggles to make her family grasp the dangers posed by Nazism to the man she loves—and when they urge her to transfer her affection to a nice Aryan youth, Otto, she moves from tense, even barbed, remarks (e.g., telling Erich, a former ski instructor whose work with aging female customers involved more than athletics, “I don’t imagine the Storm Troopers are immune to your charms”) to an outbreak break with them all.

Crooked Cross now plays to audiences passing an awareness of outcomes that British theatergoers of the prewar period could not have possessed, and it is staged now without imposing such retrospective historical knowledge.

In light of that, Carson’s insights are all the more prophetic and prescient, particularly in the damage caused by a nihilistic rejection of imperfect but irreplaceable representative government. Lexa’s question to her siblings reverberates as much now as in the 1930s: “When you’ve broken everything you can touch, all of you — what do you think you’ll do then?”

Theater Review: Harold Brighouse’s Witty ‘Garside’s Career,’ at the Mint Theater

Nearly 50 years ago, Alan Alda’s screen debut as writer, director, and star was entitled The Seduction of Joe Tynan, a step-by-step examination of how a liberal politician becomes caught up in the Washington vortex of ambition, playing to the crowd, and sex. Except for the public niceties still observed in pre-WWI Britain, Harold Brighouse might just as easily have called his anatomy of the same wayward instincts in London “The Seduction of Peter Garside.”

Garside's Career, like other plays mounted at the Off-Broadway venue the Mint Theater, is a lost and neglected play. After premiering at London’s West End in 1914, it enjoyed a successful run on the other side of the Atlantic in Boston five years later.

For some reason, plans to bring it immediately to Broadway were scuttled, and it seems to have disappeared from British stages too, even though Brighouse lived until 1958. So New York audiences are getting their first look at a clever, century-old send-up of a different form of inflation: a young striver’s sudden burst of ego.

If you’re an American TCM fan, you probably know just a little of his work, through David Lean’s 1954 film adaptation of his most successful play, Hobson’s Choice. (An interesting bit of trivia, from the Mint’s playbill for Garside’s Career: Hobson’s Choice was also adapted in 1966 as a Sammy Cahn-Jimmy Van Heusen Broadway musical, Walking Happy. Maybe that one will be revived someday by Encores!? Please?)

But Brighouse wrote more than 30 plays, as well as fiction, journalism, and memoirs. His output is well worth sampling if this production is any indication.

His title character, “silver-tongued” Peter Garside (played by Daniel Marconi) thinks his “genius” for oratory will take him to a station that his newly acquired license as a skilled mechanic (or, in the phrase of the time, “engineer”) can’t even remotely match.

But fiancée Margaret Shawcross, noticing that his gift for public speaking is dangerously intoxicating, warns him against depending on it.

None of this can stand in the face of the irresistible temptation presented by Garside’s Socialist labor group: a chance at a Parliamentary seat in a by-election. Seizing it gives him the opportunity he craves but at the price of his engagement.

Before long, as an MP, he has a comfortable apartment in London, with aspirations for more money, political power—and a permanent end to living in the dingy northern England town of Midlanton. He even makes advances on Gladys Mottram, a provincial siren as bored with her status as the daughter of the most influential family in town as Garside is with his distinctly lower standing.

Garside’s oratorical quelling of rioters about to break into the Mottram home only hardens belief in his political wizardry. But his neglect of meetings and votes that matter to constituents back home trigger a dizzying fall from power.

American audiences of the 21^st century might not be able to identify with the class tensions of pre-WWI Britain, which found their ultimate expression in social welfare legislation passed by the Liberals and the eventual rise of the Labour Party.

But the underlying conflict that Brighouse depicted retains its transatlantic relevance: At what point does the desire to better one’s self involve forgetting your working-class roots and the people who recognized your potential in the first place?

In the battle between capital and labor, Brighouse’s sympathies were decidedly with the latter—a point underscored here when Margaret refuses to back down from her Socialist activism, even when threatened with the loss of her teaching job by the formidable Lady Mottram, wife of the mayor of Midlanton.

Nevertheless, he dispensed with propaganda—one of the group supporting and then bringing down Peter is archly called “Karl Marx Jones,” and he was far more interested in the countervailing emotional and ethical instincts of politicians than their policy considerations.

In one sense, contemporary audiences may find dated the notion that an indiscretion will spell the end of a politician’s career. Nowadays, he (and more often than not, it is a “he”) will try again for public office, after a year or two biding his time—as former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is doing now.

But Brighouse exposed in the modern political animal a trait that remains intact: egotism that swells with even the slightest audience and deflates with none.

The cast (largely veterans of past Mint productions) play their roles adeptly, starting with Marconi, who expertly navigates Garside’s transition from earnest laborer to pompous MP to political has-been.

Madeline Seidman endows faithful Margaret with appropriate steely love, able to endure in turn Peter’s growing appetite for power, narcissism, brush with scandal, self-pity, and even a gorgon of a mother (with Amelia White making the most of the play’s most hilarious lines). And Sara Haider and Avery Whitted offer a nice contrast as the to-the-manor-born Gladys and her cheerfully superficial brother Freddie.

In the three decades of its existence, I have managed to see more than a dozen productions by the Mint. It has approached each with the kind of attention and loving care that these stepchildren of modern theater have deserved. Harold Brighouse’s play is no different. I urge you to see it before it closes on Theater Row on Saturday, March 15.

Directed adeptly and confidently by Matt Dickson, Garside's Career nicely complements Hindle Wakes, another dramedy by Brighouse’s friend and fellow Northern England playwright, Stanley Houghton. The Mint is offering on-demand screenings of a three-camera HD recording of their 2018 production through Sunday, March 16. Viewing is free after providing your email address and zip code; donations are welcome.

Theater Review: Teresa Deevy’s ‘The Suitcase Under the Bed,’ From the Mint Theater

Although its mandate to rediscover long-neglected works has primarily covered the U.S. and Great Britain, the Mint Theater has also brought welcomed renewed attention to notable past Irish playwrights, such as Lennox Robinson (Is Life Worth Living?, reviewed here), Hazel Ellis (Women Without Men), and today’s case in point, Teresa Deevy (1894-1963). 

It is one of the anomalies of the theater world that Deevy, a playwright with such an acute ear for characters’ speech, struggled for virtually her entire adult life with the burden of deafness.

Remarkably, Deevy succeeded in getting six of her plays produced in the 1930s by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. But by the middle of that decade, with the company leaving the orbit of founders Lady Gregory and William Butler Yeats, she ran afoul of the literary politics of the time and could no longer get her work performed there.  For most of the rest of her productive working life, then, she turned to the radio, producing a dozen original works for the B.B.C. and Radio Éireann, in addition to adapting some of her other works for broadcasting.

After being elected to the Irish Academy of Letters, Ireland’s highest literary honor, Deevy went pretty much from here to obscurity. Then, seven years ago, the Mint Theater made her an object of serious re-evaluation with its production of Wife to James Whelan, the play rejected by the Abbey in 1936.

The title The Suitcase Under the Bed refers to where all of Teresa Deevy’s writing was stored for decades. Deevy’s grandniece showed them to the Mint Theater’s Artistic Director, Jonathan Bank, who ended up staging the world premiere of three of them—Strange Birth, Holiday House, and In the Cellar of My Friend—along with her best-known one-act, The King of Spain’s Daughter, staged by the Abbey in 1935.

Not all the plays work effectively, but collectively they testify to Deevy’s willingness to try new forms—and to the Mint acting company’s versatility in playing different characters in the same evening.

The most impressive of the discoveries, Holiday House, is the kind of light-as-air comedy that Noel Coward might have tried if he had ever spent substantial time in Ireland. A family gathers at their mother’s seaside home for a late summer holiday. Derek, married for a few years, finds his carefully cultivated savoir-faire sorely tested as he copes with unsettled business involving ex-fiancee Doris (Ellen Adair); her haughty, jealous husband, Derek’s brother (Aidan Redmond); and Derek’s rattled wife Jil (Gina Costigan). Witty repartee flies back and forth, as the quartet try to remain civilized even as they veer inevitably toward verbal sniping.

Redmond had other opportunities to shine, too. In The King of Spain’s Daughter, he masterfully depicted an authoritarian patriarchal figure who gave his daughter Annie a choice: wed his younger coworker, Jim (A.J. Shively), or work in a factory. (The play evoked a time when women—particularly high-spirited rebels like Annie (played with willful, headlong romanticism by Sarah Nicole Denver) —had few choices in life.) And, in Strange Birth, Redmond played a thoughtful middle-aged postman proposing marriage to a skittish maid (the estimable Ellen Adair).

Holiday House and The King of Spain’s Daughter were more memorable than Strange Birth and the remaining one-act play, In the Cellar of My Friend. But the Mint troupe managed to spin multiple subtle variations on the theme of marriage, and the distinctive voice of Deevy was heard once again—and now, one hopes, it will continue to reverberate in rediscovery mode.

The Suitcase Under the Bed closed at the end of September. But I couldn’t let the opportunity go to review it before The Mint Theater starts another season.

Theater Review: ‘Yours Unfaithfully,’ Presented by the Mint Theater Co.

The New York Off-Broadway troupe The Mint Theater Co. specializes in bringing to modern audiences plays and playwrights that, for one reason or another, have utterly fallen off the radar. But few of its productions have presented the kind of challenges posed by Yours Unfaithfully.

The play, which closed this past weekend at The Beckett Theatre at Theatre Row, has elements of a sophisticated comedy by Noel Coward, but it hurts too much. And then there is the matter of its argument for open marriage—material almost as loaded, in our sexually tolerant century, as it was when Miles Malleson wrote it in 1933.

Best known as a comic actor and screenwriter in the early days of the British film industry, Malleson (1888-1969) was all too intimately familiar with situations such as this. His daughter attended a school operated by Dora and Bertrand Russell, the British mathematician and philosopher who would become notorious as a sexual libertarian. Moreover, Malleson himself had participated in unusual sexual arrangements with his first wife, Lady Constance Annesley, as well as birth control advocate Joan Billson and journalist Beth Tomalin.

The couple at the center of this play, Stephen and Anne Meredith (Max von Essen and Elisabeth Gray), are as enlightened and fluent with words as their real-life inspirations: She teaches at a well-regarded school of progressive ideals, while he is now experiencing excruciating writer’s block. Worried by Stephen’s near-constant peevishness, Anne suggests that he go away and get into “mischief.”  And she has just the person in mind: her attractive friend Diana Streatfield (Mikaela Izquierdo), still mourning the loss of her fiancée.

No sooner does Anne make the suggestion than Stephen acts on it. Even when she discovers him stroking Diana’s hair, Anne kisses her friend and says how glad she is to have her visiting. To all outward appearances, Anne is unfazed.

But appearances can be deceiving. In the next act, with two months having elapsed, Anne pours out the jealousy she never thought she’d experience—first to family friend (and former lover) Alan Kirby (Todd Cerveris), then to Stephen himself.

By the play’s midpoint, Anne is in the position of the narrator of Carly Simon’s song “No Secrets”: “You always answer my questions,/But they don’t always answer my prayers.” By the third act, Stephen—no longer as eager to continue the affair—hurries back from a planned weekend on the Continent, but Anne, in a fit of tristesse, now plans her own fling.

If Malleson intended to write a justification for disregarding lifelong monogamy, he failed, perhaps because he was too honest not to acknowledge that there was a large amount of self-interest at the heart of Stephen’s all-too-eager acceptance of his wife’s ill-considered suggestion. The playwright may have intended to depict Stephen’s father, a minister, as overly puritanical (as, indeed, Malleson thought his own uncle, a vicar, clearly was). But many a viewer will likely come away thinking that Canon Meredith, for all his narrow-mindedness, has the better of the argument while watching the emotional upheaval in which Anne and Stephen have plunged.

The problem with Yours Unfaithfully, then, is not that it is dated but that it works at cross-purposes, with its brief for rejecting Puritanism undermined by Malleson’s candid depiction of the emotional instability unleashed by demolished sexual mores.

Producing artistic director Jonathan Bank did not direct with the same sure hand that he did with other recent productions such as John Van Druten’s London Wall. (Of the three principals, only Gray manages a completely convincing English accent—and she and Cerveris are the cast members who most fully inhabit their characters.) But in this comedy shot through with pain, he has delivered to the world a play that feels anything but musty.

Theater Review: N.C. Hunter’s ‘A Day by the Sea,’ From the Mint Theater Co.

Over the last half-dozen years, I’ve come to rely on the Mint Theater Company to present wonderfully staged productions of unfairly forgotten plays. But a second rental increase in three years forced this jewel of the Off-Broadway theater scene out of the West 43^rd Street building it had called home for the last two decades. Fortunately, it found another domicile only a block south, on West 42^nd Street, in the Beckett Theater on Theatre Row.

Five other theater companies share space in the complex with the Mint, but for playgoers, it is a more comfortable, pleasant environment. At the same time, the space still allows playgoers the feeling of eavesdropping on a very small group of people—an essential quality in sustaining the aura surrounding its current production, a revival of N.C. Hunter’s serio-comedy of the 1950s, A Day by the Sea.

This is not the first time that the Mint has turned its attention to Hunter: A couple of years ago, it mounted another success of his on London’s West End, A Picture of Autumn. But now, with this production, it is making a sustained case for taking him seriously and reviving his reputation once and for all.

A Day by the Sea focuses on Julian Anson, a stuffy, workaholic mid-level Foreign Service diplomat,

who finds himself, after two decades of ceaseless striving, in becalmed waters. Taking a break from his posting in Paris to visit his mother at her seaside home, he discovers that an expected promotion won’t be coming to him after all. The rejection leads him to intense self-examination about his shallow private life as well, a process only magnified by the arrival of his childhood friend Frances.

At first glance, Frances would seem exactly what Anson would not want: a widow with two young children who had become the kind of scandalous woman that respectable people run away from. She had worshipped Anson until her late teens, when, realizing his focus on college and his career path had become all-consuming, she ran away to marry a much older man who had since died. More recently, against her better judgment, she wed a younger man who killed himself. His suicide note, forgiving her, was printed in the newspapers, making her notorious.

Anson’s late recognition of her love—and his determination to make amends for his long-ago neglect—leads him to think he can reshape their future by taking up where they left off. But matters are not so simple, as Hunter considers the sad impossibility of returning to the past.

The interplay among the characters here is deeply sensitive and nuanced, and one gets the distinct impression from reading about Hunter that this play is all of a piece with his other work. But so deeply has Hunter been forgotten by the theater world that one is stunned to find that once he was very highly regarded indeed—that is, until Kenneth Tynan dealt a grievous blow to his reputation.

The strong influence of Anton Chekhov in Hunter’s work especially provoked the British drama critic. A Day by the Sea seems almost tailor-made for this criticism, with several elements suggesting the playwright’s particular attention to Uncle Vanya:

*It depicts a middle-aged male’s melancholy upon abruptly realizing that his life’s work doesn’t really amount to much;

*It features a doctor of great intellectual gifts who is increasingly lapsing into alcohol; 

*A plain but kind woman pines helplessly for the doctor;

*An attractive woman causes the males around her to lose their minds;

*An elderly man wakes up periodically to say comic, often inappropriate things;

*The playwright presciently worries about both man’s encroachment on nature and an unseen but sensed upheaval in the future of his nation (for Chekhov, a revolution that will destroy the aristocracy; for Hunter, the Suez crisis that marked the end of Great Britain as an imperial power).

Far more than other contemporary West End practitioners of the “well-made play” like Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan, Hunter suffered grievously at the hands of Tynan, who championed the “angry young man,” often fiercely political theater of John Osborne. It didn’t help that Hunter's stress on character development rather than plot make for a pace that can charitably be described as leisurely. 

The latter fault has not disappeared. But the strength of the play also appears more readily than Tynan gave it credit for: naturalistic dialogue that gives virtually the entire cast of 10 at least one opportunity to sharply define the laconically expressed but very real disappointment of middle-class characters who sense that, like the tide, the promise of their early lives has ebbed. 

Much of this is due to veteran actor-playwright-director Austin Pendleton, who has demonstrated his range convincingly this fall by staging another British play from the Fifties vastly different in tone from this one: Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, at the Pearl Theater Co.

Pendleton has elicited striking performances from his cast. Julian Elfer subtly marks out Anson’s transformation from buttoned-down bureaucrat (someone with “a lot of porridge in his veins,” according to his own mother) to a more questing figure who tries to recapture his youthful sense of confidence, purpose and idealism. Katie Firth renders Frances with a dignity and realism about her severely constricted choices after a series of life mistakes. 

Polly McKie brings poignancy to the role of the affectionate but lovelorn 35-year-old governess to Frances’ children, seeing in the prospect of marriage to hard-drinking Dr. Farley a last chance for both of them. And, as the doctor, Philip Goodwin unleashes a ferocious rhetorical outburst that at once castigates diplomats for the failures that result in war, explaining much about his personal downward spiral. 

 

A Day by the Sea closes this coming Sunday. Once again, the Mint has done well by a theatrical work that has been inexplicably and shamefully consigned to the margins.