Henry Arthur Jones

The British dramatist Henry Arthur Jones has fallen out of fashion now, but he was once extraordinarily popular.

I've previously written about The Silver King, a melodrama Jones co-wrote with Henry Herman that opened at the Princess's Theatre in 1882, starring Wilson Barrett as a reformed drunkard who makes his fortune in a Nevada silver mine.

Two years later, Jones collaborated again with Herman in a bizarre reworking of Henrk Ibsen's A Doll House called Breaking the Butterfly. The play sought to give the drama a happy ending, in which the husband offers to ruin himself for his wife before the difficulties are resolved without sacrifice.

That's not what happens in Jones's 1894 play The Masqueraders, though. The play famously staged a card game in which one man won the wife and child of another. He then whisks his new "wife" off to the Alps, thinking to raise a family abroad with the woman he loves. Ultimately, though, the woman's sister convinces him that this plan would render her impure in the eyes of her child. Instead he undertakes a journey to Africa in which he will most likely perish.

Africa seems to have been a convenient place for Jones to send men off to once their romantic lives grew too complicated. He did the same thing at the end of his 1897 play The Liars. In that play, Edward Falkner is in love with a married woman, Lady Jessica Nepean. Her domineering husband Gilbert nearly drives her into Falkner's arms, but in the final act, the comical Sir Christopher Deering whisks Falkner off to Africa to mediate with some warring chieftains, leaving Lady Jessica to return to her husband.

However, The Liars should not be confused with Jones's later play The Lie, which was made into a (now lost) silent film. Perhaps when you write as many plays as he did, you have to start cycling back through title ideas.

Gods-Given Comedy

Last night I finally caught up with Gingold Theatrical Group's production of Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw. This new staging by director David Staller imagines a pantheon of gods looking down on Henry Higgins as they bring his "creation" to life.

Mark Evans plays Higgins, the socially awkward expert in phonetics who finds a flower girl and bets he can pass her off as a duchess. That flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, is performed by television star Synnøve Karlsen, who shows Liza's evolution from calling out "Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-ow-oo!" to articulating some of the finest language Shaw ever wrote.

The rest of the cast play white-clad gods who relate the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, as told by Ovid, and then perform all of the other roles. Just as the mythical Pygmalion carved a statue and prayed to the gods to bring her to life, Higgins teaches Eliza correct speech but worries that there's something missing. He takes her to an "at home" day of his mother (played brilliantly by Lizan Mitchell) in hopes that he can find that intangible quality she's missing.

This scene was the highlight of the show for me. Karlsen manages to get so many of the manners of respectable society right while at the same time getting everything horribly wrong. The always game Carson Elrod plays Colonel Pickering, Higgins's partner in phonetical crime, while Matt Wolpe plays the visiting twit Freddy Eynsford Hill and Teresa Avia Lim takes on the role of his obnoxious sister Clara. After Eliza makes a less-than-stellar impression, uttering the dreaded "b-word" on her way out, we believe Mrs. Higgins when she says, "if you suppose for a moment that she doesnt give herself away in every sentence she utters, you must be perfectly cracked about her."

Higgins, it turns out, is perfectly cracked about her, but not in the way everybody thinks. Shaw rewrote the ending to Pygmalion multiple times, and Staller gives us yet another ending, in which the cold, remote Higgins just begins to crawl out of his shell at the end. It's a refreshing change from both overly romanticized and overly cynical versions of the story in recent years.

Pygmalion is playing at Theatre Row until November 22nd, so get your tickets now! There's also a companion event at the American Irish Historical Society tomorrow at 6pm. I'll definitely be there.

Frankenstein in Jersey

There have been numerous stage adaptations of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, going back to Richard Brinsley Peake's Presumption in 1823.

The gothic tale has also provided plenty of material for film, beginning with a 1910 short made by the Edison studio, and continuing through to the Guillermo del Toro epic recently released by Netflix.

I was particularly keen to see the stage adaptation being performed now at Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. It uses a script penned by David Catlin for the Lookingglass Theatre Company in Chicago and is directed by STNJ's artistic director, Brian B. Crowe.

This adaptation uses as a framing device the famous story-writing contest at Villa Diodati in Switzerland in 1816. Mary Shelley (played by Amber Friendly) becomes Elizabeth, her common-law husband Percy (Sean-Michael Wilkinson) becomes Victor Frankenstein, and their friend George Gordon Byron (Jay Wade) appropriately emerges as the monster.

Also present during that fateful summer by Lake Geneva was Byron's personal physician John Polidori (Neil Redfield) who semi-plagiarized Byron's tale and published the first famous vampire story in English. Polidori goes on to enact a number of roles in this production, including Victor's friend Henry and the ship captain who encounters first Victor and then the mysterious creature.

We wouldn't know as much as we do about that summer at Villa Diodati were it not for Claire Clairmont (Brooke Turner), Mary Shelley's stepsister who kept a detailed journal that year while waiting for the birth of the child she had with Byron. Claire plays Victor's mother in this adaptation, among a number of other roles, and sometimes nearly steals the show.

The play is showing until November 16th at the F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre in Madison, New Jersey. It's just a short distance from the train station in Madison, on the beautiful campus of Drew University, and it's well worth a trip!

A Punch in Nottingham

James Graham's new play Punch, which closes this weekend at Manhattan Theatre Club, takes place in the English midland city of Nottingham, and Nottingham itself could almost be a character in the piece.

I visited Nottingham in 2019 when I attended a conference by the British Association for Romantic Studies at the University of Nottingham. The famous Nottingham Castle was closed, but I walked around it, and I attended services at the Victorian Roman Catholic cathedral in the heart of the city.

Nottingham is known as a working-class city, with a long history of rebelliousness, particularly during the Industrial Revolution, when it was helping to remake the world into what we know it today. With the de-industrialization of Britain that occurred after World War II, the progress of the city's working class was stymied, as Graham's play makes clear.

Much of the action takes place in a housing project built in the 1970s that is described as inside out: all the residences face one another with their backs to the street. It was the type of utopian planning that flourished in the '60s and '70s and usually went horribly wrong. In this case, what was meant to be a bastion of community ended up making residents feel cut off from the rest of society.

As crime in the project increased, more and more security cameras were added, but this just led to young people figuring out how to take circuitous paths that avoided all of the cameras. The main character in the play, Jacob (performed by Will Harrison in his Broadway debut), likens taking the dodging path to being in a real-life video game. Everything, in fact, seems like a bit of a game to him, from picking fights at cricket matches to making pocket money by selling drugs.

All of this turns sour when he steps in to help out a friend in an argument with a stranger. He throws one punch--that's it--and the stranger falls back, hits his head, and subsequently dies. That stranger, as always is the case, had his own life. He was a paramedic. He had two loving parents. He had a bright future ahead of him. All of that was brought to an end by a single punch. (Though it didn't help that the doctors at the hospital dismissed him as a drunk and sent him home with a brain hemorrhage rather than giving him immediate care.)

Punch is based on a true story, and comes with all of the conventional tropes one would expect from a "real life" drama. Jacob puts on a tough facade, does a laughably short amount of time in prison after a murder charge is reduced to manslaughter, and then struggles to get his life back after incarceration. He gets a job packing boxes (since logistics has replaced making things in the post-industrial era), goes back to school, and renews a courtship with a young lady named "Clare without an 'i'" (Camila Canó-Flaviá).

More surprisingly, he agrees to meet with the parents of James, the young man he killed. All three of them are looking for answers, and they form an unlikely bond as they attempt to move on from a tragic and unnecessary death. The parents, Joan and David (played by Victoria Clark and Sam Robards), naturally attract our sympathy, but so does Jacob as he struggles to make some sort of atonement for what he's done.

One interesting plot thread involves Raf (played by Cody Kostro), who also bears responsibility for the tragic events but escapes legal if not moral consequences. The entire ensemble is deftly directed by Adam Penford. If you want to see the show, you'll have to catch it soon, though, as its final performance is on Sunday.

Sweet Bird of Youth

Tennessee Williams was good at making monsters. In his 1959 play Sweet Bird of Youth, the movie star Alexandra Del Lago says to Chance Wayne, the man she's using while he uses her, "When monster meets monster, one monster has to give way, AND IT WILL NEVER BE ME."

Sweet Bird of Youth fascinates due to the drama of monster meeting monster. Arguably, every character in the play is a monster to one degree or another. Certainly Del Lago, who is traveling under the name of Princess Kosmonopolis, is one. Aged past her prime and having given up on any chance of a comeback, she ends up in a hotel in St. Cloud, Florida, as reasonable an approximation of Hell as anywhere.

Chance Wayne is a monster, too. He grew up in St. Cloud, so of all people, he should know better than to return. (Williams's St. Cloud is on the Gulf, by the way, while the actually town of St. Cloud is right in the middle of the state, far from the coast.) His plan is to reunite with Heavenly, a young woman he loved as a teenager, though now both are falling apart physically as well as mentally.

Disease and surgery have rendered Heavenly a bit of a monster, though she's nothing compared to her father, the politician Boss Finley. Williams writes in a stage direction that Boss Finley's attitude toward his daughter should not be related "in terms of crudely conscious incestuous feeling" though the fact that Williams wrote that implies a certain level of incest to the desire.

The greatest monster in the play seems to be time, though, which ticks away relentlessly at each character. At the end of the final act, Chance doesn't ask for pity, or even understanding, but just for the recognition of time as the enemy of us all. The title, Sweet Bird of Youth, is after all painfully ironic.

Williams wrote the play for the actress Tallulah Bankhead, who starred in a tryout production in Coral Gables, Florida. When the piece opened on Broadway at the Martin Beck, though, it had Geraldine Page in the role of Princess (Del Lago). Paul Newman played Chance Wayne. Both returned for the film version of the piece, which was released in 1962.

The play, by the way, is referenced in the film Death Becomes Her (later turned into a stage musical) in which Meryl Streep's character stars in a musical version of Sweet Bird of Youth called Songbird! I can only imagine what that might have been like...

Monsters, Monsters, Monsters!

It been a spooky season, and I've been watching a lot of spooky films. Last night, I saw The Phantom Carriage, directed by Victor Sjöström, who also plays the protagonist in the 1921 silent.

The film uses double exposure to create haunting images, and seems strongly influenced by A Christmas Carol. By the 20th century, I imagine that not only Charles Dickens's novella but several stage versions of it had become widely known in Sweden, where the film was made. The movie's plot revolves around not Christmas but New Year's, which makes the film also reminiscent of another supernatural piece by Dickens, The Chimes.

Recently, I was curious to learn of a dark Tennessee Williams film adaptation, The Fugitive Kind. It's based on Orpheus Descending, which reworked a previous Williams play, Battle of Angels. I had to look the film up after I found out it was directed by Sidney Lumet with a host of great actors, including Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Joanne Woodward, and Maureen Stapleton. Brando was paid a million dollars to be in the film, which was unheard of in 1960 when the movie was released.

In spite of Brando's star appeal, the film lost money. It did better than Battle of Angels, though, which closed during tryouts in Boston. The reworked version, Orpheus Descending, did much better, running for 68 performances at the Martin Beck on Broadway. Stapleton played the female leading role of Lady on stage, but was replaced with Magnani in the film, taking on instead the substantial but smaller role of Vee. The story, in all of its iterations, is a Southern Gothic tale of lust, revenge, and murder.

This evening, I watched another spooky movie, Guillermo del Toro's new adaptation of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Like A Christmas Carol, that novel has been adapted for the stage over and over again. In fact, next weekend I'll be seeing a new stage version at Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. Monsters, figurative or literal, tend to do well on stage, especially this time of year.

No Emperors

Yesterday there were "No Kings" protests throughout the United States, and at the Joyce Theater in New York City the anti-monarchal ballet The Emperor Jones by the Limón Dance Company.

I went due to the connection of the dance piece with its source material, the play The Emperor Jones by Eugene O'Neill. The play, with its extensive stage directions and overwhelming focus on a central character whose internal fears are made manifest around him, seemed already halfway to being ballet when José Limón first adapted it to dance in 1956.

O'Neill wrote the play in 1920, and the Provincetown Players premiered it at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York City, starring Charles Sidney Gilpin. The show was a hit and had to be moved to a larger theatre to accommodate the large crowds who wanted to see it. It then toured the United States, providing many people in the U.S. with their first contact with Expressionism on stage.

When the play was revived on Broadway in 1925, it starred the previously unknown actor Paul Robeson, who went on to star in it in London and then on film in the 1933 movie version. The piece was thus already famous when Limón turned it into a showpiece for his own virtuosic dancing, taking on the role of Brutus Jones, who after rising to become emperor over a Caribbean island, disintegrates psychologically and is ultimately killed by a silver billet.

O'Neill's stage directions indicate that "Little Formless Fears creep out from the deeper blackness of the forest." The Little Formless Fears danced excellently in this production, though the forest was transformed into an urban jungle of skyscrapers. The company's revival kept Limón's original choreography, but adapted the costumes and sets to turn it into a parable about capitalism. They also allowed women to dance some of the roles, though Limón originally envisioned an all-male cast.

The piece was suitably creepy, though, which set the mood for the show I saw in the evening, Stephen Smith's One Man Poe, which he performed at Poe Cottage in the Bronx. Seeing Smith perform virtually every word of "The Black Cat" and "The Raven" in the house where Poe once lived was a real treat.

If you missed him, don't worry! He plans to be back with more Poe stories next October!