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Endurance champs
Pride’s Crossing; The Mousetrap
BY CAROLYN CLAY

It’s easy to think of Tina Howe as A.R. Gurney in a dress. Her tales of eccentric-Brahmin disappointment dovetail with his of a dying Buffalo upper crust. The 1998 New York Drama Critics Circle Award–winning Pride’s Crossing (at Wellesley Summer Theatre through June 18) is such a work, its nonagenarian denizen of the posh North Shore enclave of the title reflecting on a hemmed-in life of privilege, its promise long ago washed up on the shore of Calais. Howe’s Mabel Tidings Bigelow was sparked by Gertrude Ederle, who in 1926 became the first woman to swim the English Channel. But Howe based the character on her own 90-year-old Aunt Maddy, "who never left home, never married, and never swam a stroke." In the play, she gives Aunt Maddy wings — well, water wings.

Less surreal than some Howe plays, Pride’s Crossing is divided between the summer of 1997, when the infirm but still feisty and adamant Bigelow is planning a Fourth of July croquet party, a relic of earlier times, and flashbacks to said earlier times, when this child of wealth was growing up in a male-dominated household amid baronial splendor, familial strife, and Irish servants. The daughter of an autocratic if adventuring yachtsman and his troubled wife, with Olympic-diver and class-clown older brothers, the girl loses herself in swimming — at which she shows surprising endurance, negotiating miles of cold water while emptying her head of all but nursery rhymes. The culmination of this watery odyssey comes when the young Mabel does indeed swim the Channel, at the same time striking up a romance with a British Jew who had done the same. She, however, returns to a life of well-born American-female expectation, marrying a handsome if drunken member of her social set and winding up beached on shoals of regret. The play has a sort of double climax, a Lewis Carroll–worthy croquet free-for-all giving way to a final, poetic vision in which the young Mabel at last takes the leap into the deep she could not earlier gather the courage to make. The end of the play recalls the breathless, not-to-be-fulfilled optimism of David Hare’s Plenty. But too much of Howe’s portrait of unhappy privilege is cliché’d.

The Obie-winning dramatist’s writing, however, is always literate, her use of metaphor graceful. If the upper-class twits of Pride’s Crossing are to some degree useless, at least they’re literate. One character, lifelong Mabel admirer Chandler Coffin, is an amateur poet, and bookish references (from Shakespeare to D.H. Lawrence) abound, the most apt being Yeats’s description of aged man as "a paltry thing/A tattered coat upon a stick." It is such paltriness to which Mabel Tidings Bigelow, for all her rued timidity and bitter reflection on the lap not taken, refuses to be reduced, vowing in the end to give up playing by the rules, if only to turn a round of croquet into codgers’ chaos.

When Pride’s Crossing opened in 1997, it was buoyed by the magnificent Cherry Jones, darting among incarnations of Bigelow from 10 to 90 without a drop of make-up, as is the script’s conceit. Wellesley Summer Theatre’s leading lady, Alicia Kahn, attempts the same scissored-up approximation of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man and does not do a bad job — though she’s more convincing as the heartbreakingly hopeful young Mabel, before all the sans-es. As the wobbly-kneed 90-year-old, in whose incarnation she spends half the play, Kahn manages a consistent head bobble, and her transmigrations across the stage are veritable attacks on the floor with a walker. (The play begins as a gentle piano intro gives way to the angry thumping of this ambulation aid as Mabel makes her entrance.) But she seems to be acting, rather than embodying, the fragile, infuriated old woman.

Nora Hussey’s production unfolds with a certain calculated unreality on a snowy set framed in diaphanous curtains, its floor exhibiting a faint wave pattern, the elderly Mabel’s worn wicker chair contrasting with the spare, stark-white furnishings of the fabled past. The staging is mostly mundane, though there are some nice effects, including a pale, dreamy suggestion, via parasols and trees, of Georges Seurat’s Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte as the croquet party approaches.

Hussey minimizes the play’s tilt toward the absurd, opting not to follow original director Jack O’Brien’s Cloud Nine–like gender-blind double casting; here men play men (and boys), and women play women. Lisa Foley supplies a kindly, no-nonsense Irish cook who provides the young Mabel with a bit of the warmth missing from family life chez Tidings (all of whose too-blue-blooded occupants save Mabel have met absurd or tragic ends). And Heather Boas is her apple-peeling daughter, who returns as an older woman approaching Mabel at the funeral of her husband. "Have you been happy?", Mabel asks her, concluding that happiness comes sporadically, "when you least expect it." The trick is in having the less than genteel guts to grab it.

The Mousetrap (at Stoneham Theatre through June 19) is almost as venerable and creaky as Mabel Tidings Bigelow. This signature Agatha Christie whodunit has been playing in London’s West End continually since 1952, its 10 million patrons urged not to reveal the ending. Director Adam Zahler is usually at the helm of edgier stuff (he recently won an Elliot Norton Award for his direction of Permanent Collection at New Repertory Theatre). But here he takes on an old warhorse and proves it’s not ready for the glue factory yet. My one quibble with the solid Stoneham Theatre production is that its most enjoyable actor — Paula Plum, in full Maggie Smith in Tea with Mussolini mode — gets bumped off early. But other delicious performers stick around for just deserts.

The Mousetrap, for those who’ve never seen it set and triggered, unfolds at Monkswell Manor, a one-time private home on the brink of transformation into a "guest house" some 30 miles from London. Just as young, inexperienced hoteliers Mollie and Giles Ralston prepare to greet their first quartet of boarders, a blinding snowstorm hits, cutting the residents off from the rest of the world as the "wireless" blares news of a murder near Paddington. Add to the expected "guests" — Christopher Wren, a troubled if enthusiastic young man hoping to follow in the architectural footsteps of his namesake; Mrs. Boyle, an imperious and nitpicking matron of a certain age; Major Metcalf, a retired military officer with requisite pipe and cardigan; and Miss Casewell, an elusive and mannish woman of means — an unexpected one, a suave Italian who goes by the name of Paravicini, and a detective who materializes to link Monkswell Manor with the unsolved killing touted on the radio and you’ve got board and players for an ambulatory game of Clue.

Jenna McFarland has designed the stately wainscoted parlor in Stoneham, from which enough doors, passages, and stairs (seen and unseen) extrude to have the characters, who lack the sense to band together against attack, popping in and out of the space like clock cuckoos. Detective Sergeant Trotter — who makes his first appearance skiing past a door-sized window that’s flanked by draperies sufficiently commodious to hide Polonius — warns the assemblage, none of whom (with the exception of the Ralstons) knows any of the others, that one of them is being stalked by the killer of the woman in Paddington. About him nothing is known but that he wore a dark overcoat, a light scarf, and a soft felt hat. (Every male in the house has deposited such garments on pegs hung in the passage leading to the front door.) The murders, both committed and anticipated, are connected to a long-ago case of fatal child abuse and to the nursery tune "Three Blind Mice," ghostly tinklings of which add to the studied if stiff suspense. (For my money, anybody who can’t quickly guess that the presumptuous and badgering Sergeant Trotter is not Hercule Poirot would also buy lots at Glengarry Glen Ross.)

With its post-war quaintness and standard English-murder-mystery characters spatting and confiding as suits the plot, The Mousetrap is fun, if less ingenious than it’s trumped up to be. And it’s nicely decked out at Stoneham, all of the stereotypes well delineated, albeit with a light touch. Lisa Morse is a feminine and sympathetic Mollie, fretting over her minced-meat and tinned-pea dinners, yet sufficiently troubled that you realize she knows more than she lets on. Robert Antonelli is a reserved, surly Giles, who would probably not succeed in the guesthouse business without a few murders to keep the clientele entertained. Dafydd Rees, his arm held stiffly behind his back, is a folksy old militarist as Major Metcalf. There’s a bit too much Puck in Tasso Feldman’s queer-eye-for-the-lost-boy Wren, but Whitney Cohen brings a melancholy hauteur to expatriate Casewell, who’s daring in pants. Louis Wheeler’s youthful Trotter combines professional urgency with bullying body language. And Plum finds her match in husband Richard Snee. The dapper performer has a fine time supplying Paravicini with roguish bonhomie and a pizzafied accent. Moreover, the presence of this Shear Madness vet reminds us that The Mousetrap is not the only mystery to enjoy a mysteriously long run on the boards.


Issue Date: June 10 - 16, 2005
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