Download Theatre: Trelawny of the Wells

Theatre: Trelawny of the
Wells
Nisi Sturgis, Jordan Coughtry (@Gerry Goodstein)
How It’s (New Jersey) New York: The Shakespeare
Theatre of New Jersey is one of the Tri-State’s
treasures. Critics come from NYC to Madison to see
work there, and of course some of the actors hail from
there as well.
How It’s Irish: While playwright Arthur Wing Pinero
was English, and the play takes place in England in
the 19th century, the kind of troupe described and the
style of acting that we see carried on further into
the 20th century. Lady Gregory and W.B.Yeats were
still mad at it when they founded the Abbey Theatre in
1904, although Pinero was really describing acting
styles of the 1860s. There’s an Irish stage manager,
O’Dwyer, in the second half.
Arthur Wing Pinero’s sweetly surprising 1898 comedy of
theatrical manners runs at the Shakespeare Theatre of
New Jersey through Sunday, Dec. 30.
Trelawny of the Wells is a play you may have read, or
even likelier, read about. Chances are you’ve never
seen it, though. This lovely production directed by
The Shakespeare Theatre’s Artistic Director Bonnie J.
Monte makes a good case for it as a regular offering
in amateur and professional theatres alike. It has a
cast of 13 (and could be more without doubling),
offering every actor roles with bite and heart. It has
a romance with young beauties that takes some
surprising turns. It has touching roles for older
actors. It even has a woman in a breeches role.
There’s a moment near the very end of the play where
Sir William Gower (Edmond Genest), about to leave a
rehearsal of a play he is backing, is stopped by the
word “Grandfather.” He turns slowly, gently, and sits,
defeated by love. All around the house, people
surreptitiously wiped tears away.
The plot of Trelawny resembles
a ’30s screwball
comedy: popular ingenue plans to marry an aristocrat
from a very stuffy family and retire from the stage.
You may think, well, she’ll return to her acting ways,
and marry the sweetie who always had a crush on her.
Indeed the play sets you up to think that, lulling you
into thinking you’re way ahead of it. The first scene,
which Pinero seems to have written so that Londoners
could come late, actually is two people talking about
the main cast. It’s not a butler and a maid, but it is
the landlady of the theatrical boarding house, Mrs.
Mossop (crotchety but kind Jennifer Harmon), talking
to the greengrocer Mr. Ablett (Matt Sullivan, working
the accent too hard in this role), about a going-away
dinner for Rose Trelawny (dreamily beautiful and
charming, blonde-ringletted Nisi Sturgis), the most
popular juvenile the Bagnigge Wells (we know it’s
Sadler’s Wells). Rose is leaving to marry a young
gentleman.
A toast! (@Gerry Goodstein)
All well and good. All pleasant and dull. The dinner
party introduces us, literally, to the cast: the cast
of the repertory company, that is. There’s Tom Wrench
(jovial and wryly intelligent John Patrick Hayden),
who just can’t get bigger roles and doesn’t mind as
much as all that, largely because what he really wants
to do is write, and who has a crush on Rose. There are
the older couple Mr. and Mrs. Telfer, played with
grandiosity by Jim Mohr and Elizabeth Shepherd, who
are hosting the dinner. There’s Rose’s sentimental
roommate, Avonia (Rachel Fox shrieks so much in this
scene that it’s rather a shock later on when she
proves to be charming and intelligent). There’s the
vain, hammy leading man Ferdinand (Jon Barker hams it
up with a nice touch of vulnerability). And there’s
Imogen (smart, dashing Caralyn Kozlowski) the actress
who’s left the Wells to be a star on the West End.
Soon we meet the nice young aristocrat, Arthur Gower
(Jordan Coughtry) whose shy, handsome quality suggests
Hugh Grant.
Because you think you’re sure of where this is going,
you feel a little sorry for Arthur when he can’t even
get out a simple toast without going on too long and
having literally to be shushed by everyone.
But there are glimpses that Pinero’s up to something
else, too, when Rose is talking about her late mother,
who was also an actress and always wanted Rose to get
out of it.
She plaintively, touchingly repeats”I do
hope she sees.”
What happens in Trelawny is that some things happen
that you expect to happen, but when they do, they mean
something very different. And unlike the stock comedy
it at first seems to resemble, the characters in
Trelawny are changed by what happens to them,
profoundly. Pinero is not interested in merely
sketching at types. He fills in eachtype– grande dame,
vain actor, diffident aristocrat–
condescending.
with love, never
Nisis Sturgis, Jon Barker, Rachel Fox (@Gerry
Goodstein)
But we will next see her as a fish most definitely out
of water, in the stuffy Cavendish Square home of
Arthur’s’s family, where she is to stay “on approval,”
as she says herself. His grandfather and great-aunt
are hilariously stuffy, falling sleep after dinner
(Jennifer Harmon plays the nervous, proper Miss
Trafalgar Gower), disapproving of sneezing and sitting
on the floor. But again: just when you think this is
going to be about comic contrasts, it isn’t, though
there is comedy. Arthur truly loves Rose, and tries to
stand up to his intimidating grandfather. When Rose
has had enough and runs away with her actor friends
who have come for a visit the play takes a sharp left
turn.
Tom, the playwright, is not a love interest after all:
he’s a harbinger of the new kind of theatre that
depends on mundane characters doing “real” things.
He’s based on T.W.
Robertson, who introduced a kind
of “teacup” play to the 19th-century stage in a time
when the theatre was dominated by improbasbly stories
of singing peasant girls and highwaymen.
When we next meet Rose, she’s lost her spark. She
misses Arthur, and her time in London has taught her
somehow not to love the fake old theatre she used to
love. First her salary is reduced, and then she is let
go. And when Arthur’s grandfather Sir William comes to
see her, he’s a broken man too, brought to life by a
spark of remembering the great actor Edmund Kean when
he sees that Rose has a memento of Kean’s given to her
by her mother (it’s not Gilbert and Sullivan, so she’s
not Kean’s long-lost daughter or anything).
There may be no greater tribute to the theatre when
the grandfather later asks to watch a rehearsal of
Tom’s play, Life, which he helped to back, just one
time, because he cannot get the play out of his head
since the author read it. It reminds him of some
members of his family, he says. “Late, members of my
family” Genest delivers these lines gruflly, simply,
and gives you a flash of insight into the fire that
he’s stifled
in pursuit of a calm life.
Genest is
the actor who broke my heart, but as in the kind of
ensemble company that Pinero draws in Trelawny, he is
one of a wonderful company.
John Patrick Hayden, Caralyn Kozlowski (@Gerry
Goodstein)
Could you blame anyone at being a stage-door Johnny
for Nisi Sturgis, with her beautiful and expressive
face, sweet singing voice, and mercurial touches of
humor and sorrow? There seems no kind of character
this charmer cannot fully inhabit and make us love.
Rachel Fox, when she’s dressed as the prince for a
Panto (pantomime) production, shows the energy and
exuberance of the ingenue. She is unimpressed by Sir
William’s riches, telling him what he’s done to Rose:
“You’ve broken her heart, and what’s worse, you’ve
made her genteel.” As Mrs. Telfer, Elizabeth Shepherd
catches your heart when she reveals she’s been called
to Tom’s production not to act in it but to be
wardrobe mistress. And her earnestness when she asks
her husband, the lovable Jim Mohr, on hearing he’s
been asked to play an old stagey out-of-date actor,
“do you think you can get near it,” is adorable.
Connor Carew plays a meddling, inefficient Irish stage
manager with hilarious ebullience, and despite their
rise in fortunes both John Patrick Hayden’s Tom and
Caralyn Kozlowski’s Imogen retain the dignity and
affability they had earlier. For me, though, Edmond
Genest’s gruff, dignified, vulnerable aristo stole the
show.
Nisi Sturgis, Edmond Genest (@Gerry Goodstein)
What a valentine to theatre. This is not about how
there’s an actor inside everyone: that would be a
joke. This is how powerful art can be, how dangerous
even, and how sacred, even holy it is.
The love for
the “splendid gypsy” as Grandfather describes Kean,
and as we see in these actors trying to find a life
for themselves, is simply infectious.
It’s a gorgeous looking play, too, thanks to Hugh
Hanson’s costume design, and scenic design by Bonnie
J. Monte and Anita Tripathi Easterling that both
suggests the actual places and also the beautiful oldschool artificiality of theatre. Yep, the fireplace is
cardboard. Yep, we can see the brick stage wall in
back.
Special mention has to be made of Monte’s sound
design, which includes the vaudeville standard “The
Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery.”
I wanted to sing
along.
I didn’t want the play to end.
(this is not from Trelawny, but it is a version of the
1895 song that made Marie Lloyd famous).