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<b>by Lillian Hellman, directed by Martha Henry
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
June 25-October 8, 2005
</b>
"Chekhov on the Gulf"
Lillian Hellman’s “The Autumn Garden” was last seen in Canada in a touring production that stopped in Toronto in 1952. The Shaw Festival’s production is thus the first-ever Canadian production of the play and likely only the second time the play has been staged in Canada. This revival of unjustly neglected works is one of the Festival’s greatest services to our literary consciousness and sense of continuity. Those who know Hellman only from such brutal works as “The Children’s Hour” or “The Little Foxes” will be surprised to discover a more elegiac side to this famous writer.
The play is set in a guest house, once a large family home, in a summer resort on the Gulf of Mexico about a hundred miles from New Orleans in early September 1949. The play is like a cross between Tennessee Williams and Chekhov as faded Southern belles and drunken beaus gather to lament the passing of time and the waste of their lives.
Constance Tuckerman runs the guest house to earn her living. Her brother went off to war but stayed in France. Constance has brought his daughter Sophie to live with her and serve in her staff, hoping to give Sophie the advantages she never had. Other regular guests are the wealthy Mrs. Mary Ellis, her daughter Carrie and her son Frederick. Constance and Carrie are especially looking forward to the marriage of Frederick and Sophie. No one except Sophie is quite willing to face the implications of the fact that Frederick does not love Sophie and wants to travel to Europe with a notorious homosexual author.
Edward “Ned” Crossman stays at Constance’s guest house for two weeks every year. They were once in love but Constance refused to marry Ned. Her ideal has always been the famous painter Nicholas Denery, whom she loved before Ned. Now Nick and his rich New York wife Nina are coming stay. Nick wants to pick up a portrait of Constance he did 20 years ago, the last time they saw each other, and to paint a companion portrait of Constance for an upcoming exhibition. As a parallel to the marriage plot is a side plot about General Benjamin Griggs, who wants to divorce his flirtatious wife Rose, despite her opposition. As in Chekhov disillusionment lies in wait for every character except Sophie, who, perhaps because she is a foreigner and outsider, can see through the lies that others want to believe.
The cast is a “Who’s Who” of the Shaw’s favourite actors. Sharry Flett gives a luminous, heart-breaking performance as Constance, a beautiful woman clinging onto an ideal long after it is clear Nick is not and never was a good man. Flett registers Constance’s increasingly hopeless struggle to keep her past image of Nick alive until an awkward event causes her to see him for what he always was and to recognize how her decision not to marry Ned has blighted both her life and Ned’s. Her final scene with Ned, played with great compassion by Jim Mezon, resonates with the melancholy realization of truths faced too late.
As Nick, Peter Hutt gives one of his most powerful performances. Nick begins as a rude, brash, interfering lecher who only gets worse the more he drinks. Hutt not only finely gradates Nick’s descending levels of drunkenness and abuse but still lets us see that this wreck of a man could once have been a great artist. Laurie Paton brings off the difficult role as Nick’s sophisticated wife, someone thoroughly disgusted with Nick’s serial betrayals but who still knows she loves him despite everything.
Patricia Hamilton is forceful as the matriarch of the Ellis family whose domineering nature is by turns comic and deadly serious. Goldie Semple plays her daughter Carrie, who would like to seem strong but is left helpless between the demands of her mother and the actions of her son. As her son Frederick, Mike Shara does nothing overt to suggest Frederick is homosexual since Frederick himself doesn’t seem to realize his actions point in that direction. He has a brotherly friendship with Sophie but whether the idea of marriage was forced on them or planned by Frederick as a cover is not clear. Charlotte Gowdy’s character Sophie turns out to be the one person who links all the various strands of the plot. Her demure behaviour and French accent make her seem deceptively weak. Indeed, it would help if Gowdy showed more of the thwarted fire that burns within Sophie to make her change from innocent to mercenary seem more in character.
As General and Mrs. Griggs, David Schurmann and Wendy Thatcher would seem to be the most comic characters of the story. Griggs’s total indifference to his wife and Rose’s mindless flirting with anything in pants despite her age do begin as a humorous counterpoint to the increasingly darkening storyline, but Schurmann and Thatcher expertly show that even these characters act as they do out of desperation.
The production would be recommendable just as a chance to see so many of the Shaw’s finest actors on stage together in the intimate Court House Theatre. William Schmuck’s design for the guest house’s inviting main room and for the numerous gowns for the women is very attractive. Louise Guinand enhances his autumnal palette with the warmth of her lighting that suddenly turns cold when the action reaches its crisis. The production would be even more recommendable if director Martha Henry has managed to infuse the action with a greater sense of urgency and tension. Even the main crisis seems muted. The play proceeds as one detailed scene after another but without a sense of the play’s overarching structure or the interplay of the various strands of the plot. Only at the very end do these become clear, but Henry should have helped us to see the work’s trajectory long before this.
Nevertheless, the vigour of the company’s expert ensemble acting and the intensity of its characterizations make up for the lethargy of Henry’s pacing. Hellman thought this her finest play. The Shaw company goes a long way to showing us why.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photo: Sharry Flett and Peter Hutt. ©Andrée Lanthier.
<b>2005-08-11</b>
<b>The Autumn Garden</b>