Living in the Past

Review of Lettice and Lovage, Westport Country Playhouse

Very British and very verbal, Peter Shaffer’s amusing Lettice and Lovage, directed by Mark Lamos at Westport Country Playhouse, takes aim at ugly architecture and the vicissitudes of history, and finds its warmer tones in the unexpected bonds that can lead to friendship. It’s a benign farce, irrepressibly genteel—and if that sounds a bit like a fun oxymoron, then this play might be just the thing for you.

Kandis Chappell undertakes the role of Lettice Douffet, a role written for Maggie Smith, and gives a likeable and sympathetic performance, though without the withering dryness that Dame Smith could affect so tellingly. A fanciful tour guide at a stately but not particularly significant historical site, Lettice dreams up all kinds of vivid hi-jinx for her charges to witness in their imaginations. The opening scenes between Lettice and her various tours—played by local, non-Equity actors—are charming and well-timed. We see her go from the plodding “stick to the script” tour through increasingly fabricated accounts. Eventually, her wanderings from the path of historical veracity are shut-down by Charlotte Schoen (Mia Dillon), a formidable functionary who is having none of it.

Charlotte Schoen (Mia Dillon), Lettice Douffet (Kandis Chappell) (photo: Carol Rosegg)

The scene between the two of them, in the latter’s office, is crisp and engaging, as we learn of Lettice’s theatrical background—an actress mother who had her own way with enacting Shakespeare in France—and begin to think that Shaffer has found an interesting occasion for the intersection of theater and history: the guided tour! Lettice, we see, is a misplaced thespian, someone who has to take such “roles” only to make ends meet. A historicist who tends to prefer earlier times to the present, her calling is clearly something higher than could be assigned by Ms. Schoen’s office.

The second act brings this idea closer to fruition when Charlotte, in hopes of helping Lettice, pays a visit to her rather medieval-looking but still modest flat. John Arnone’s scenic design makes much of the space, including an intricate backdrop to contrast the flamboyance of Lettice’s decorating with the drabness of her surroundings. Her purpose in life, we realize, is to battle “the meres”—those who are satisfied with mediocre tastes, middling intellects, and who find uplift in the incoherence of modern architecture. What’s surprising—and it ends Act II on a high note—is that she may have found, after a few “quaffs” of the ancient beverage called lovage, an accomplice in Ms. Schoen.

Mr. Bardolph (Paxton Whitehead), Charlotte Schoen (Mia Dillon), Lettice Douffet (Kandis Chappell) (photo: Carol Rosegg)

Act III, after intermission, purports to be a bit of a who-done-what as there is now a solicitor on the premises, played with mystified patience by the unflappable Paxton Whitehead, and acts of violence to be accounted for. Lettice, who flirts with the idea of being a terrorist against appalling buildings, may have done who knows what. There’s fun in watching her incessantly grand manner come up against the prosaic—and unflattering—sensibility with which the law and the press handle those who aspire to a more imaginative realm for judgment.

Mostly, Shaffer’s play is what Sterne’s Tristram Shandy would call riding a hobby-horse, and the script is such as to make that hobby-horse pirouette and prance and canter. It’s not a race horse and takes its time getting where it’s going. The play’s strength is the appeal of its roles for middle-aged female actors, able to command the stage through the grace of their speech, the layers of their characterization, and, for Lettice particularly, eye-pleasing costumes by Jane Greenwood. The play is never quite as bizarre or as satiric as it might be, but, like much successful British humor, it makes the most of its idiosyncrasy.

Lettice Douffet (Kandis Chappell)

Revived in a post-Brexit era, Lettice and Lovage smacks of a certain kind of Tory-style “Britain above all” that, it’s well to be reminded, had, even in the late-Eighties when the play debuted, a certain priggish daftness. The best that can be said about would-be architecture terrorists in the current climate is that they could be called anything but quaint.

Lettice & Lovage
By Peter Shaffer
Directed by Mark Lamos

Scenic Design: John Arnone; Costume Design: Jane Greenwood; Lighting Design: Philip Rosenberg; Sound Design: John Gromada; Fight Director: Michael Rossmy; Props Master: Karin White; Production Stage Manager: Megan Smith

Cast: Kandis Chappell, Mia Dillon, Sarah Manton, Paxton Whitehead

Tourists: Travis James, Kara Hankard, Richard Mancini (Surly Man), Michele S. Mueller, Robert Peterpaul, Hermon Telyan, Danielle Anna White

Westport Country Playhouse
May 30-June 17, 2017

Psychiatric Shenanigans

Review of What the Butler Saw, Westport Country Playhouse

Revivals of ground-breaking work can be tricky business. Once the initial shock is gone, what does the work have to offer? Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw is a ribald, witty, absurd farce and though, for our times, it’s hardly as daring as in 1969, when it debuted, it still puts its cast through its paces. Directed by John Tillinger with a feel for the play’s strengths, the comedy treats marriage, psychiatry, health care professionals, hotel service people, the police force, gender roles, sexual tastes and Winston Churchill to fast-paced, irreverent fun.

The mention of Churchill should tip you off to one main characteristic of Orton’s comedy. It’s British, in the way that Monty Python is British, or the Carry On series is. And that means its form of verbal humor can be a stretch for American ears. It’s not just the accents, it’s the entire grasp of how the language of polite society works. Orton’s characters are articulate to a fault. But most of what they say is potty, loony, off-its-chum. It’s not just the idiom either. The humor, to work, requires an earnest and serious manner among the players. For the most part, the cast is equal to the challenge, but even so. One can only imagine how much better this would play in Britain.

Dr. Prentice (Robert Stanton), Geraldine Barclay (Sarah Manton), Dr. Rance (Paxton Whitehead) (photo: Carol Rosegg)

Thankfully, the Westport production benefits from Paxton Whitehead, who specializes in playing the kind of fatuous ass who is not only a send-up of professionalism, psychiatric jargon, get-ahead ethics, and lack of imagination, but of a distinctly British sense of how the establishment works. Indeed, Orton’s zinginess comes from the fact that he’s trying to skewer established norms—particularly about sexuality—that keep the British unflappable, and Whitehead’s Dr. Rance is a walking textbook of self-satisfied credulity.

Mr. and Mrs. Prentice (Robert Stanton, Patricia Kalember) (photo: Carol Rosegg)

His foil is Dr. Prentice (Robert Stanton), the ne’er-do-well who gets the shenanigans off and running by piling silly pretense upon ludicrous lie. He begins by attempting to seduce, in smarmy predatory professional manner (in the days before “sexual harassment” had a name), a dim, accommodating would-be Gal Friday Geraldine Barclay (Sarah Manton, wonderfully manic). Stanton’s Prentice is not a villain so much as an erring human who can’t admit mistakes, so he becomes a kind of Jerry Lewis of escalating miscalculations. He’s married to a philandering female (Patricia Kalember, who enacts the estranged, liberated wife with brittle cool) and is trying to maintain his professional and sexual status in a world that delights in how easily anyone can lose all dignity. Not least Sergeant Match, a forthright constable (Julian Gamble) who ends up in his underwear and later a dress and wig, and Nicholas Beckett (Chris Ghaffari), a game bell-hop who has to go about in drag and, eventually, the altogether.

Nicholas Beckett (Chris Ghaffari), Sergeant Match (Julian Gamble) (photo: Carol Rosegg)

In a sense, the play is much ado about nothing, with a vengeance. The notion that “deviant” behavior can be analyzed and “helped” is one of Orton’s targets, but that ship has sailed, more or less. The play works because it does what farce is supposed to do: undermine the layers of pretense that people cling to as a means of denying what is happening in front of them. Orton has a knack for the tableau of someone catching someone else in a compromising moment. The point of such take-offs and put-ons is that we’re all of us compromised by our appetites, desires, and petty indulgences. Along the way there is sport with the kind of well-made play that has to tie up all loose ends, with a fond nod to Oscar Wilde’s Earnest.

The detailed set (James Noone) and suitable costumes (Laurie Churba) help create the kind of rational world that will become topsy-turvy as the play goes on, including the various fates of a demure flowered dress and a racier leopard print. There are four doorways and they will all be used with expert timing, as well as a host of apropos props. The challenge here is in keeping up with the verbal and the physical comedy and, while it never achieves complete hysterics, Tillinger’s production at Westport does keep it all bouncing merrily.

What the Butler Saw
By Joe Orton
Directed by John Tillinger

Scenic Design: James Noone; Costume Design: Laurie Churba; Lighting Design: John McKernon; Sound Design: Scott Killian; Dialect Consultant: Elizabeth Smith; Movement and Firearms Choreographer: Robert Westley; Props Master: Karin White; Casting: Tara Rubin Casting, Laura Schutzel CSA; Production Stage Manager: Megan Smith

Cast: Julian Gamble, Chris Ghaffari, Patricia Kalember, Sarah Manton, Robert Stanton, Paxton Whitehead

Westport Country Playhouse
August 23-September 10, 2016