Zack (Mint Theater Company)

By Harry Forbes

The Mint has followed up last season’s superlative revival of Lancashire playwright Harold Brighouse’s “Garside’s Career” with a lesser Brighouse work, but in its way, still a charmer, his 1916 comedy “Zack.”  The play has been revived three times by the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, the first time with an impressive cast including Patricia Routledge, Trevor Peacock, and Lindsay Duncan. 

The titular character, played here by Jordan Matthew Brown, is a sweet natured loafer treated with dismissive disdain by his widowed mother Mrs. Munning (solid Melissa Maxwell) and arrogant brother Paul (David T. Patterson nailing his character’s villainy) who runs the family’s faltering catering business. 

Mrs. Munning sets her sights on her well-heeled niece Virginia (aka Jenny) (Cassia Thompson) for Paul, and invites the young woman to stay with them as she convalesces after a recent illness. But it’s clear from the start that it’s the uncalculating Zack who charms her with his guileless ways.

Complications ensue when Paul coldly sacks worker Joe Quigley (superbly gruff Sean Runnette), when the latter suffers a broken arm. Before long, Joe bursts in, hellbent on revenge, one that will involve forcing Zack to marry Joe’s lovelorn daughter Martha (Grace Guichard). 

Brown makes an impossibly clueless (and frequently annoying) character tolerable, and Thompson is a constant delight in her highly sympathetic role. (The dynamic between Zack and Jenny will remind seasoned theater and filmgoers of the central characters of Brighouse’s most famous play, “Hobson’s Choice.”) 

There’s good work too from Caroline Festa as Sally, the pretend-maid hired by Mrs. Munning to impress the wealthy Jenny, and Guichard as Martha who engage in a second act verbal slugfest over Zach. David Lee Huỳnh and Douglas Rees round out the excellent cast as Joe’s cronies. 

If I have a gripe, it’s that British accents, particularly of the Northern variety, so essential in Brighouse’s works, are curiously eschewed here. As a result, the play loses much of its texture, and the dialogue sometimes has a flatness without the Lancashire lilt. The essentials of the play are all intact but could have been that much more characterful. If you’re curious, you can hear a more authentic sounding performance in this vintage BBC Radio version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7yPVKVzptA&t=237s

That said, Britt Berke directs a tight performance -- one hour and 45 minutes without intermission -- with attractive contributions from Brittany Vasta (sets), Kindall Almond (costumes), and Jane Shaw (sound & arrangements).

(Theatre Row, 410 West 42nd Street; bjany.org;  through March 28)

Photo by Todd Cerveris: (l.-r.) Cassia Thompson, Jordan Matthew Brown

Garside’s Career (Mint Theater Company)

By Harry Forbes

British playwright Harold Brighouse (1882-1958) is best remembered for his 1915 “Hobson’s Choice,” frequently revived and famously filmed by David Lean in 1954 as a vehicle for Charles Laughton. But kudos to the Mint for resurrecting this rarity of his from the same era, and according it a belated New York premiere. (Though produced in Boston in 1919, a proposed New York staging never materialized.) 

The play turns out to be a highly absorbing story of a Northern England engineer (mechanic) the titular Peter Garside (Daniel Marconi), who after obtaining a prestigious degree unique for working class background, is persuaded to run as a Labor candidate for a seat in Parliament.

His doting mother (Amelia White) has absolute faith in his chance of success. But his pragmatic schoolteacher fiance Margaret (Madeline Seidman) is skeptical of Peter’s temperamental suitability, given his facile gift of gab (“The itch to speak is like the itch to drink,” she warns), so much so that their engagement is broken. As it happens, Peter wins the seat, but his subsequent overblown sense of self importance and braggadocio about his demagogue-like ability to control the masses with his smooth rhetoric will surely lead to a downfall. And indeed it does.

Contrasted with the working class folks of his hometown of Midlanton, which also includes Peter’s cronies and local party organizers Karl Marx Jones (Michael Schantz), Ned Applegarth (Paul Niebanck), and Dennis O’Callaghan (Erik Gratton), all finely characterized, are the upper crust characters we meet in the second act.

There's the imperious Lady Mottram (Melissa Maxwell), the mayor’s wife and head of the school board where Margaret teaches, who disdains Garside’s socialist views, and her frivolous son Freddie (Avery Whitted) and independent-minded daughter Gladys (Sara Haider) who falls under Peter’s charismatic spell, and who Peter claims is his inspiration after spotting her adoring look during one of his speeches.

Performances are uniformly strong anchored by Marconi who believably captures the charm and hubris of the increasingly cocky Garside, Seidman’s sensible and wise Margaret, and White’s plain speaking mother. 

 

Under Matt Dickson’s assured direction, “Garside’s Career” proves a solid, exceedingly well constructed play with crackling dialogue, both muscular and witty, all of which makes its neglect all the more puzzling. Throughout, Brighouse has skillfully devised many dramatic scenes which unfailingly hold our interest.. 

Christopher Swader and Justin Swader’s sets neatly encompass the Garside’s humble Midlantan cottage, the Mottram drawing room, and later, Peter’s posh London digs. Yiyuan Li’s lighting likewise captures the respective ambience of each locale. Kindall Almond’s costumes are period perfect. And Carson Joenk’s expert sound design includes convincing effects to suggest an unruly mob. 

(Mint Theater Company, 401 West 42nd Street; through March 15)

Photo by Maria Baranova: (l.-r.) Michael Schantz, Erik Gratton,  Paul Niebanck, Daniel Marconi, Madeline Seidman and Amelia White

Becomes a Woman (Mint Theater Company)

By Harry Forbes

Broadway musical buffs may recollect Betty Smith’s name on the cover of the cast album as co-librettist of the 1951 musical, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (based on her international 1943 best-seller). But that, in fact, was to be her only Broadway credit. And yet, Smith was apparently a prolific playwright who prized the dramatic field above all others, turning out around 70 plays. Several won prestigious prizes, but none of them received professional productions. 

Just how dedicated she was to the genre is apparent in Mint Theater’s absorbing production of her 1931 play which won the University of Michigan’s renowned Avery Hopwood Award.

The play’s protagonist shares the name of the central character of “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” Francie Nolan, but there all similarities end. This Francie, impressively played by Emma Pfitzer Price in her Off-Broadway debut, works in a Kress five-and-dime-cent store in Brooklyn as a song plugger at the sheet music counter. A steadfastly virtuous 19-year-old who resists the myriad flirtations of the male customers much to the amused disdain of accompanying pianist Florry (entertaining Pearl Rhein with a Louise Brooks bob) who has far fewer scruples.

But when good looking, upper crust Leonard (Peterson Townsend), the son of the Kress chain’s chief (Duane Boutté), asks her out for a date, she finally lowers her guard and relents.

In the second act, we meet Francie’s lower middle-class family -- boorish policeman braggart of a father (forceful Jeb Brown), pious mother (Antoinette LaVecchia really nailing the character), tactless brothers (Tim Webb and Jack Mastrianni) -- when she brings Leonard home to meet the folks, with (slight spoiler) disastrous results. 

The color-blind casting of Leonard here rather requires some temporary suspension of disbelief, as Pa Nolan makes it patently clear before Leonard walks through the door that he expects any fella Francie brings home to be Irish Catholic. As it happens, the whole family treats Leonard with amusingly fawning deference as it seems they’ve never had a well-bred gentleman in the house before.

Without revealing any plot specifics, in the third act, let’s just say that Francie shakes off her shy passivity and comes to full maturity, living up to the play’s title. 

The humorous tone of the first act -- with Price skillfully warbling a handful of songs, most especially Jerome Kern’s “Left All Alone Again Blues'' from “The Night Boat” -- and engaging in light banter with the other shopgirls, gives way to some pretty heavy kitchen sink melodrama in the second (actually, quite literally, as it takes place in the Nolan kitchen), and then a serious and sobering third. Smith’s dialogue has the ring of veracity, and her feminist perspective is highly persuasive throughout, even if some of the plot turns challenge credulity. 

Vicki R. Davis’s sets -- the colorful Kress Dime Store of the first act (which a program note is careful to assure us is purely fictional in all respects as the real-life Kress chain never even had a Brooklyn store), and the Nolan’s tenement kitchen in the second -- are beautifully realized on the Mint’s modest budget. Likewise, Emilee McVey-Lee’s costumes are period perfect.

Under the assured direction of Britt Berke, Price’s highly committed central performance makes us really care about Francie’s plight, and overlook some of those script improbabilities. Her transition from the passive girl of the first act to assured woman in the third is truly outstanding. And there’s marvelous work from Gina Daniels -- likable and warm -- as Francie’s workmate and neighbor Tessie, Jason O’Connell as the good-hearted ambulance driver who’s sweet on Tessie, and Boutté as Leonard’s slickly unflappable father who shares some important moments with Price in the final act. 

(NY City Center Stage II, 131 West 55th Street; minttheater.org; through March 18)

Photos by Todd Cerveris:

(Top)(l.-r.) Townsend, Price

(Below)(l.-r.) Price, Daniels, Brown, LaVecchia