Theatreguide.London
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The Theatreguide.London Review
In March 2020 the covid-19 epidemic
forced the closure of all British theatres. Some companies adapted
by putting archive recordings of past productions online, others
by streaming new shows. And we take the opportunity to explore
other vintage productions preserved online. Until things return to
normal we review the experience of watching live theatre onscreen.
Philip
Goes Forth
Mint
Theater (2014) Spring 2023
New York's Mint Theater, which specialises in reviving forgotten plays from the early Twentieth Century, began streaming shows online when live performances were paused, and continue to release new and archived material.
George Kelly's 1931 social comedy is a warm and amiable piece that doesn't actually go much of anywhere, but offers a pleasant journey along the way.
Its strongest impression is not of hilarity or satire, but of the playwright's love for his characters and charitable forgiveness for all their flaws and follies.
Philip is a young man working in his father's successful business but dreaming of a more fulfilling life. He yearns to go to New York and become a playwright, sure he will easily succeed despite having no training, experience or evidence of talent.
Act Two finds him in New York, in a boarding house shared with other artistic wannabes, as the possibility that success may not be quite so easy or automatic begins to sink in.
The rules of romantic comedy would seem to require that Philip become a success in Act Three, if only by accident, and get the girl. But all I will say is that George Kelly breaks those rules and still manages to find his way to something like a happy ending.
Every single character in the play is flawed or foolish, and yet every single character is given some counterbalancing quality that redeems them and keeps them loveable.
Philip is naïve, but he is very young, and the play (through the voices of several older characters) says that young men should be naïve and foolish, at least for a while.
His father seems philistine and closed-minded, but he is a self-made success and his only crime is thinking that his son should find his success on the same path. A loving aunt is ineffectual but supportive.
Phil's girlfriend's mother has more money than brains, but she also has more generosity of spirit. The self-dramatising and airheaded would-be poet among Philip's housemates is, we are assured, the only real artist among them, and so on.
There are no villains and no one so limited or wrong-headed that the play – and the audience – cannot love them and wish them well.
Much the same is true of this Mint staging from 2014. Faced with characters written to appear shallow and near-cartoonish at first and only show further dimensions slowly, director Jerry Ruiz allowed his cast to play more externally and simplistically than might be ideal.
Whole characterisations are built on a single note or mannerism. The father is stuffy, the society matron bubbles, the poetess flounces around the stage, another housemate skulks moodily, the girlfriend is pretty and little more – and so the whole thing has just the slightest air of amateur or community theatre about it.
But then even that is forgivable, so pervasive is the play's atmosphere of affectionate charity.
Bernardo Cubria (Philip), Christine Toy Johnson (aunt), Jennifer Harmon (NY landlady) and the rest may have created more real and rounded characters elsewhere, but few that were more attractive and enjoyable to be with.
Gerald
Berkowitz
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