Betty Jones (Brenda Meaney) has a bone to pick with her husband (Michael Frederic) in Mint revival of Harold Chapin’s THE NEW MORALITY (photo by Richard Termine)
Mint Theater
311 West 43rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 25, $55-$65 (all seats $43 for the final week; $100 for last show, followed by a farewell party)
866-811-4111
www.minttheater.org
The Mint does the theater world another great service by reviving Harold Chapin’s deliciously delightful comedy of manners, The New Morality. In honor of the centennial of Chapin’s death — the Brooklyn-born British playwright and actor was killed in action in WWI in September 1915 at the age of twenty-nine, before this play was ever produced — Mint artistic director Jonathan Bank has finally brought it to New York for its first theatrical run; it previously played only a handful of matinees way back in 1921. The three-act, nearly two-hour show takes place in 1911 on a houseboat on the Thames, where local socialite Betty Jones (a devilishly vampy Brenda Meaney) has just laced into neighbor Muriel Wister with a loud string of unwomanly insults on a day so hot that the morning milk is going sour almost immediately. Her friend Alice Meynell (Clemmie Evans), a prim, proper, demure young woman, arrives for tea only to find Betty still in bed, bemoaning her outburst. “Did you or did you not hear me call that woman a —,” Betty begins to ask, cut off by Alice responding, “Well, she is . . . ,” to which Betty declares, “I know she is! But you can’t go calling people dog-show names on the deck of their own houseboat in a voice loud enough to be heard across the river.” Betty’s husband, the stodgy Colonel Ivor Jones (Michael Frederic), then comes in, demanding that his wife apologize to Muriel, but she insists she will do nothing of the sort. “Don’t you think it would be politic? I do,” Jones says, to which Betty replies, “A man always thinks the most politic thing he can do is to humiliate his wife.” It turns out that Betty verbally attacked her neighbor because Muriel more than tolerates Ivor’s infatuation with her; he follows her around like a puppy dog in full view of the rest of the community, wholly embarrassing his wife. After Alice departs, Betty and Ivor are visited by Muriel’s husband, E. Wallace Wister (Ned Noyes), a milquetoast stick in the mud who demands that Betty answer for her actions, but again she refuses to acquiesce. Soon Betty’s suave brother, lawyer Geoffrey Belasis (Christian Campbell), enters the fray as the discussions grow more and more heated in wildly funny ways, assessing not only the specific situation but the state of British high society and women’s place in it.
Playwright Harold Chapin examines love, marriage, and British society in stinging comedy (photo by Richard Termine)
As with so many Mint productions, the set, designed by Steven C. Kemp, is utterly charming; the first act takes place in Betty’s lovely chintz-covered bedroom, while the second and third acts are held on the spacious deck of their houseboat, with projections of the Thames and the shore on the back and sides of the stage. (Be sure to stick around during the first intermission to watch the magical change.) Meaney (Indian Ink, Venus in Fur) is superb as Betty, a clever, forward-thinking woman with a yearning sexuality and a fab wardrobe courtesy of costume designer Carisa Kelly. Chapin joins Shaw and Wilde in their investigations of the “New Woman” of the early twentieth century, breaking with Victorian ideas of propriety and forging a new identity in public and private spheres. Like them, he delivers his sociological thoughts via wickedly sharp dialogue skewering the British upper class, ably performed by a cast that also includes Kelly McCready as the Joneses’ curious maid, Lesceline, and Douglas Rees as their stout man-servant, Wooten. When Chapin died, the British theatrical press mourned his loss; St. John Ervine wrote in the Guardian, “It must be true that the taste for comedy, which is an educated taste, has very nearly disappeared from London. But it will, no doubt, come back again; and when it does this play will have its day.” The New Morality is finally having its day in New York City at the Mint, and one can only hope that more of Chapin’s works are on the horizon. Unfortunately, that won’t be happening in the Mint’s home of twenty years, 311 West Forty-Third St., where the company has become the latest victim of the real estate market. The Mint will continue — Bank has a full slate of plays lined for 2016 — but the location is up in the air as of now.