✭✭✭✩✩ / ✭✭✭✩✩

by Susan Glaspell / Eugene O’Neill, directed by Meg Roe

Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

June 8-October 12, 2013

Mrs. Hale in Trifles: “We live close together and we live far apart”

This year’s lunchtime offering at the Shaw Festival under the umbrella title “Trifles” is a double-bill of short American plays from the teens of the previous century.  The first, Trifles (produced 1917) by Susan Glaspell (1876-1948), is a small gem of a play fascinating in itself and important in the history of feminist drama.  The second, A Wife for a Life (written 1913), the first ever play by Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953), is a rough-hewn stone and is mostly interesting for its curiosity value.  The two make a good pairing because Glaspell and O’Neill were co-founders of the Provincetown Players, a non-commercial theatre dedicated to producing new American plays.  The pairing also shows two writers of the same period attempting to reinvigorate old forms – Glaspell with great success, O’Neill with less.

Before the action of Trifles begins, a farmer John Wright has been found dead in bed strangled with a rope.  His wife Minnie, who had been sitting calmly downstairs, has been arrested and put in jail.  George Henderson, the County Attorney (Jeff Irving); Henry Peters, the Sheriff (Graeme Somerville) and Louis Hale (Benedict Campbell), a neighbouring farmer have all come over to the Wright farm to investigate.  Mrs. Hale (Julain Molnar) and Mrs. Peters (Kaylee Harwood) have also come over.  The two women are told to stay in the kitchen where the Sheriff says there is nothing but “kitchen things” while the men look over the bedroom and the barn to figure out how someone could have murdered Wright while he slept without his wife noticing it. 

The men’s assumptions that a frail woman like Minnie could not have murdered her husband and their rejection of the kitchen as a source for clues are clear signs of how men can be blinded by their prejudice towards women.  Glaspell changes the standard detective play into an exploration of women’s issues. 

When the women try to mention some of the odd things they have noticed, Hale dismisses their finds by saying, “Well, women are used to worrying about trifles”.  As any fan of modern crime fiction knows, it is the very “trifles” found at a crime scene that are the most important clues.  The women use deductive reasoning coupled with their own experience to build up a picture of Minnie Wright’s life with her husband.  Sewing gone awry on a quilt reveals she had been tense.  A birdcage with the door torn off suggests there was a bird in the house that somehow stirred a violent reaction.  The fact Mrs. Hale knows that Minnie stopped singing after she married, leads her to see a connection.  Eventually, the two find a key piece of evidence among the “trifles” of Minnie’s sewing things.  At that point the women have to decide whether to hand over the evidence and condemn Minnie or to conceal it and save her.

Of the men, Jeff Irving as the Attorney is especially good at depicting a man in power, full of himself, convinced of his rightness and condescending to the “weaker” sex.  We have the feeling that the Attorney’s freedom in expressing his prejudice leads the two married men to voice similar opinions in solidarity. 

Of the two women Molnar is the more effective.  She speaks with the matte voice of a woman who has seen hard times and has no illusions about marriage or what long years of unhappiness can lead to.  Her stony expression and calm gestures reveal an inner strength and insight in Mrs. Hale that contrasts with men’s wild surmises and running about.  The farmer’s wife Mrs. Hale also contrasts with the city wife Mrs. Peters, but Harwood gives Mrs. Peters a mid-Atlantic accent that seems out of place with the rural setting, especially when we learn she had previously homesteaded in Dakota.  Harwood is so intent on making Mrs. Peters cheerful that even her speeches about her stillborn cild and about a man who killed her kitten with an axe only momentarily darken her mood.

Director Meg Roe does not make it clear enough how the women begin from different points of view – Mrs. Hale more independent-minded, Mrs. Peters more in favour of law and order – only to reach agreement at the end.  Roe’s greatest error is to rush the conclusion.  The agreement that the two women reach is so significant that a pause, a lighting cue or at least a significant glance is necessary to let the implications of their agreement sink in. 

Roe surrounds Trifles with vocalizations by the cast, but that is not enough to separate Glaspell’s play from O’Neill’s which uses the same set.  In fact, a jar of cherry preserves that Mrs. Hale has put on the table in Trifles is there throughout O’Neill’s play even though its location is supposed to be in a miner’s tent in the Arizona desert.  How likely is it miners would have cherry preserves with them in that setting?

A Wife for a Life is a very slight work.  It alters the main formula of the then-popular form of the frontier drama by shifting its focus from the present to the past.  Unfortunately, the clearest sign of the author’s inexperience is that the play hinges on an extraordinary coincidence.  Both the Older Man and Jack have, unbeknownst to each other, loved the same woman when they were mining in Peru years earlier. 

The main reason the play succeeds as well as it does is that Irving and Campbell give such intense, convincing performances.  A person could criticize O’Neill for using the hoary device of asides and soliloquies for the Older Man to express his inner feelings, except that O’Neill would remain preoccupied with this technique for years.  It reaches its apogee in his epic family drama Strange Interlude (1928), where he uses it to highlight the difference between what all the characters say and what they think.  Campbell lends such a sense of inwardness to this device that it seems about as natural as it can be.  In contrast, Glaspell uses the much more modern technique of silences and unfinished sentences to convey her characters’ unspoken thoughts.

What will interest O’Neill fans the most is that O’Neill uses a variation of the same Bible verse in both his first and last plays – “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).  In A Wife for a Life, it reflects the Older Man’s resignation to an ironic trick of fate.  In Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956), it reflects Jamie’s attempt to convince Edmund that his goal was always to help him.  In both it represents a stance of comradeship between two rivals.       

Camellia Koo’s set unites the two works.  It easily conjures up the whole dilapidated farm of the Wrights in Trifles and would serve well as a miner’s shack in A Wife for a Life with the removal of certain props. 

Glaspell’s play is one definitely worth knowing and this production makes one curious what other plays of hers are still viable on the stage.  O’Neill’s play already shows a theme found throughout his work of the woman who poses a threat to the friendship of two men.  The difference is that while Trifles seems modern and vital today, A Wife for a Life seems old-fashioned and melodramatic.  As a lover of rarities I am glad to have seen both.  As a judge of plays, I have no doubt that in this pairing the woman’s is the stronger.          

              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (top) Kaylee Harwood and Julain Molnar in Trifles; (middle) Benedict Campbell and Jeff Irving in A Wife for a Life.  ©2013 Michael Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.