Days To Come

C-

In explaining the failure of her second play, which closed after barely a week on Broadway in 1936, Lillian Hellman commented: “I wanted to say too much.” That pretty much sums up the play’s shortcomings, as revealed in a revival by Mint Theater Company on Theater Row. We meet Andrew Rodman (Larry Bull; The Coast of Utopia), the well-meaning but ineffectual owner of a brush factory in a a small Ohio town, his restless unfulfilled wife Julie (Janie Brookshire; The Moundbuilders), his embittered spinster sister Cora (Mary Bacon; The Roads to Home), the domineering family attorney Henry Ellicott (Ted Deasy), the outspoken longtime family cook Hannah (Kim Martin-Cotten; Time and the Conways) and the maid Lucy (Betsy Hogg). When the factory workers go on strike, the union sends in organizer Leo Whalen (Roderick Hill) to advise their leader, Andrew’s friend since childhood Thomas Firth (the barely audible Chris Henry Coffey). Henry persuades the naive Andrew to bring in strikebreakers led by Sam Wilkie (Dan Daily; The Dining Room) and his henchmen Mossie Dowel (Geoffrey Allen Murphy; The Nance) and Joe Easter (Evan Zes; Incident at Vichy). With eleven characters competing for our attention, there is little opportunity for any of them to strike more than one note. There is more speechifying than conversation. It is difficult to ascertain where the focus of the play lies. The significance of the title escapes me. The level of the acting is not up to the Mint’s usual standard. The attractive period set by Harry Feiner (The Traveling Lady) includes a stool that creaks so loudly that it competes with the actor atop it. The costumes by Andrea Varga (The Suitcase under the Bed) include a dress for Julie with an aggressively busy pattern that it is an assault on the eyes. J.R. Sullivan’s direction does not pull things together. It was far from a successful evening, but it was interesting to see the state of Hellman’s craft just before she wrote her great family drama The Little Foxes. Running time: two hours ten minutes, including intermission.

The Silver Cord *

Peccadillo Theater Company specializes in reviving classic American plays. Some years back, I attended their fine production of Elmer Rice’s Counsellor-at-Law, which went on to win awards for best revival and best direction. Thus I was eager to see their current offering, Sidney Howard’s “Freudian melodrama,” which was a Broadway hit in the 1926-27 season and was later adapted for film. The fact that Peccadillo had already revived it once, 18 years ago, piqued my curiosity even more. Howard wrote this play the year after he won the Pulitzer for They Knew What They Wanted (later musicalized as The Most Happy Fella). Alas, the years have not been kind to The Silver Cord. This tale of a pathologically overprotective, manipulative mother may have seemed fresh, original and even shocking almost 80 years ago, but now seems tired, overheated and unintentionally funny. When I discovered that Mrs. Phelps would be played by a man, Dale Carman, I worried that might lead to campiness. On the contrary, Carman gives a subdued performance, which may have been the wrong way to go. The level of performance of the cast, which includes Thomas Matthew Kelley as David, the elder son, Victoria Mack as Christina, his feminist wife, Wilson Bridges as wimpy younger brother Robert and Caroline Kaplan as his flapper fiancee, is disappointing, but it would be unkind to be too hard on any actors forced to mouth such ludicrous dialog. Harry Feiner’s set, Gail Cooper-Hecht’s costumes and Gerard James Kelly’s wigs are fine. I cannot imagine what prompted artistic director Dan Wackerman to revive and helm this chestnut a second time. If nothing else, it proves that not every play a Pulitzer-winner writes will be a gem. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes including intermission.