A MAN AND SOME WOMEN
A Man and Some Women, in a challenging intimate gem of a production, is an intense and gripping exploration of human relations that pulsates with restrained vindictiveness in some of the characters. It’s not a comfortable play and, because A Man and Some Women addresses the ugly side of human nature, it requires adult honesty and insight from the audience. Director Alisa Palmer and her exceptional cast negotiate the many shades of grey in personal psychology and societal suppression of women and Githa Sowerby’s play, first produced in 1914, is certainly proves relevant today.
Three ladies garbed in black sit in a dimly lit library. One reads, one plays solitaire, one sews, and it’s a very oppressive place. Then Hilda the wife joins the two sisters Rose and Elizabeth and friend Jessica and Rose and Hilda repeatedly reveal themselves as petty, mean spirited, limited in human qualities, uninteresting and spiteful. We are compelled to experience the oppressive atmosphere in which these people lived their lives a hundred years ago, and one achievement of this production is how it explains, in demonstration, how the more undesirable side of human nature is unleashed in a society made of denial and oppression.
So, we have an unhappy marriage, two unhappy sisters dependent on their brother, a lady friend whose decency inspires some meanness of spirit, a young boy whose dependency is abused, and much sibling snippiness from Rose. Rose happily senses the worst in the relationship between brother Richard and Jessica, saying “she knows the difference between right and wrong,” while the more kindly yet attuned sister Elizabeth observes “you haven’t enjoyed yourself so much in a long time.” Richard knows Rose as a “meddler” and accusation is constantly in the air.
Richard summarizes his marriage to Hilda thus: “the whole of our life together has been planned to please you” and they then keep trying to get at one another. Richard is worn out, his sister Rose is disease posing as duty, and Hilda is his money leaching wife though, of course, in this airless society wives were expected to be dependent and kept in the home. Still, Richard is accurate in saying that he lives with ”a pack of idle shallow women” who are “bullies” and although Jessica loves Richard, she does not want to destroy him more by being a “continuation of all the others”.
Sowerby’s writing contains some challenging lines like “We forgive you, you can’t refuse to be forgiven” and “Married people can’t part simply because they are unhappy,” and many times in this compact play the characters -and we- are forced to deal with life of no easy answers. I’ve heard much praise for both this play and this production and heard of only one dissenting view that deemed it as boring. The only thing that is boring, I would think, is a lack of maturity that compels one to run from life’s difficult issues, presented in such a riveting fashion as we have at the Courthouse. Is it not a kind of personal cowardice to hide such evasion in condemnation of the production? The cast features Graeme Somerville, Marla McLean, Sharry Flett, Kate Hennig and Jenny L. Wright and each one is outstanding.
Which leads me to the positive feelings I’ve had about this year’s Shaw Festival, at least after seeing three of its offerings – A Man and Some Women, French Without Tears, and Ragtime- a week ago. A Man and Some Woman is a revival of an unknown but incisive play of much value from a historical, feminist, societal perspective, to be sure, but also of relevance to men and women who need to look in the mirror some time and consider what they are. It’s a gutsy decision by artistic director Jackie Maxwell to program and creatively interpret plays that will challenge complacency and ask that people pay their money to be disturbed, but without such purpose theatre, simply put, does not live.
FRENCH WITHOUT TEARS
Another gutsy choice by Maxwell is Terence Rattigan’s French Without Tears, a chatty period comedy from a society of long ago, 1936, a play that unfolds easy and unrushed. Certainly the audience of nowadays is accustomed to quicker pacing, snappy laughs and grabby lines –they want the punch line and they want to get going. But the gentle humour in French Without Tears evolves from the prevailing leisurely energy of characters who, throughout the play, take their time because they have time. That’s the point about these somewhat pointless people.
French Without Tears has a leisurely pace because this world it depicts has room for leisure. Thus, both the playwright and director allow us to experience the rhythm and pacing of a way of life as they are experienced by the characters before us. Gradually these characters grow on each other and they grow on us and we live with them, at least temporally, in their world. In the one other production I’ve seen of this play, some of the characters had silver spoons deeper in their mouths than in this Shaw Festival version and I despised their ingrained snobbery of privileged birth. They didn’t do much except take life slow and snobby and weren’t as likable as the characters in the Shaw production. But note that in a recent copy of The Observer, the paper’s Washington correspondent, returning to Britain, finds the country still “beset by class and inequality.” And that is relevance for you, isn’t it?
The original mounting of French Without Tears ran for 1039 performances in 1936, transferred to Broadway, and was made into a film. Perhaps folks at the time of Depression needed such light stuff, I don’t know, but it is the first major play of a man who later wrote some devastating works like The Browning Version. In any case, this production doesn’t quite probe Rattigan’s depiction of an inbred class system, but there were many laughs I heard and it does entertain. Ably directed by Kate Lynch to give the text a physical dimension, the words and movement in this production play echo to each other. The characters speak sentences in their facial expressions and gestures and do suggest meanings implicit or implied in their words.
French Without Tears reflects the manners and attitudes of a time when people acknowledged rules of social behavior, even in breaking them, so a tension exists between social form and the substrata of instincts. It’s fun, and perhaps instructive, to watch characters expressing love through awkward shyness in a time when people didn’t know everything there was to know about life, and, yes, I am being sarcastic about today’s pseudo sophisticates. Each diversion from propriety is cause for laughter but people look silly either way, either rigid in conformity or awkward and as bad as naughty, while life issues are a matter of course and resolved by a system that tolerates no laps from civilized behavior. A quaint bunch they are, but real.
We have four young men and one naval fellow, some being diplomats in training, and all required to speak French under the strict tutelage of Michael Ball’s Monsieur Maingot. The naval bloke, subtly presented by Martin Happer, is tall blazered and proper with his sense of manners and propriety. He is gullible, naïve about women and dupable, while his navy lingo is mocked by the others. The lads are casual, conceited and young, with one, Ben Sanders’ Alan, who is savvy in French and one, Craig Pike’s Brian, knows just a dozen words and seems satisfied at that. Alan, a crucial player in the play’s development, is intelligent, smart about women, authoritative, rich with insight and concern, mischievous, and appealingly vulnerable when matters of the heart arise. Meanwhile, elsewhere, we have Wade Bogert-O’Brien’s Kit, adorable in befuddlement, who loves the blonde tease Diana while Jacqueline loves Kit.
Diana is self centered, manipulative of men, greedy to have all in her power, and unkind to men whom she treats as toys. Played not too nasty by Robin Evan Willis, she is tall with sexy tomboyish limbs she likes to put on tantalizing display, and not too calculatingly cold in her manipulations, although it is said of her that “She likes to tear him up to pieces and trample on him”. Jacqueline via Julie Martel has a tactile sexuality and makes a very believable Francaise one might find in one’s imagination or on Parisian streets. She has an expansive physicality, with a touch of earthiness in her, and offers delightful inflexions in her delivery.
French, in this pleasantly charming production, means opening with a lively French duet over French travel posters, and then deliberate misguided translations like “au dessus de sa gare” and then some hilarious pronunciation “ s’il vous plate” (intentional) and “la cham-pain est tres mauvaise” (not intended). There are quick precise exchanges like “I don’t think he likes me. Who does” and word turns like “A peer in one hand” that delight. There’s also the wisdom and profundity of young drunks who can ask, “tell us why we disliked you so much” and guys just goofing around. Most intriguing are the way of life and attitudes the play implies about its characters and, most of all, its audience that gave the play’s first production a three year run in London. French Without Tears may be very understated, but beneath its surface it does suggest so much.
RAGTIME
In director Jackie Maxwell’s hands, Ragtime becomes a production of cumulative effect, both on grand musical scale and, more to the point, in plain dramatic terms. One responds from the gut at unpredictable moments and perhaps her main achievement is that a show of blockbuster dimension breathes naturally and believably through individual lives. Credit must go to Maxwell’s insightful and proportioned direction and to her casting of key actors who create through subtle shadings in their characters a natural humanity. Once one adjusts to being overwhelmed by solid narrative content and by compelling musical numbers, one discovers that the show vibrates from a potent emotional core. It becomes a drama that is sung, a drama with dramatic impetus, not so much a depiction of concisely etched musical types but a drama sung to imply depths of life in a variety of characters. We believe them as people.
Ragtime depicts an era of immense wealth, appalling poverty, suffering and survival of immigrants, and ubiquitous racism against the blacks. It’s an era of Emma Goldman, Henry Ford, Houdini, Commander Perry, Carnegie and other rich industrialists, and Booker T. Washington. It’s a time when “nothing will change in a year. Everything will be the same,” when lower east side tenements have “thousands of stories to tell, a time of “the night Goldman spoke in Union Square” and a time when racists might say, “that nigger doesn’t know he’s a nigger”. It’s a big show and sometimes feels crowded and too comprehensive in depicting an era, with individual lives too simplified, the grime and violence too stylized and clean. But such is the nature of the musical beast and fortunately Maxwell has found its believably human scale. Meanwhile, the ragtime-infused music is always listenable, sometimes catchy, and the duets and group numbers are rich with appealing harmonies. There is much variety in singing voices which gives the production a compelling texture in sound. Choreographer Valerie Moore’s loose limbed ensemble dance numbers are stylish and smooth.
The opening of Ragtime declares that this is the era, this is the music, these are the characters, and a tale is about to be told. Sue LePage’s seductively cold metal-beamed set, with mind enhancing and informative rear projections, and Alan Brodie’s dark lighting reveal the era’s inhuman underbelly. Meanwhile, LePage’s costumes are rich and precisely detailed, clothes that some in an opulent era would wear. If the book, lyrics, and music of the show guide us to emotions we are intended to feel, Maxwell’s directorial precision, meanwhile, seeks the inner lives of her characters and shows restraint form sentimentality. Yes, with a less insightful director, these whites would be tight assed and these blacks would have style, and these Jewish immigrants would be wise survivors. But they are not stereotypes at all in Maxwell’s hands and she saves us from cliché. And Terrence McNally’s book is concise and often ripe in poetical writing as in descriptions of ragtime music.
This production of Ragtime features much variety in characterization and many theatrically thrilling moments even when the complexity of individual lives is implied through presence and inflection alone. Patty Jamieson’s Mother is a woman of centered femininity, subtle in revealing her human depth, and, in her totally engaging solos of vulnerable compassion, has a voice that supports emotional variety in singing through tonal shifts. Thom Allison’s Coalhouse Walker is a very compelling man of inherent style, the most dynamic of the three anchors in the show, who sings full-bodied in all registers with resonance of deep beauty. I thought of Leon Bibb’s similar tones and when Allison sang I certainly wanted to listen, I wanted more.
As Tateh, Jay Turvey easily gets below stereotype and cliché with a vulnerable urgency in his words and manner that makes one understand the plight of immigrants. He is not as much an archetype, he’s a human being. With clean depiction, Benedict Campbell does Father as dominating and frustratingly unreachable with a glint of humanity in him. To him “destruction of property” is the ultimate sin because he owns a lot of it and there is no surprise that his idealist brother in law says “I despise you”. The latter is portrayed by Evan Alexander Smith as passionate and sincere, with believably personal values as the basis of his ideals. There are many other special performances here, including Neil Barclay’s Fire Chief Willie Conklin who, when we’re escaping into the music of this unforgettable production, brings us back to earth as a very chilling and cruel racist.