Wry society

Vokes finds the perfect match in Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story

by Steve Vineberg

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY By Philip Barry. Directed by Jennifer Lavin Howard. Set designed by Ronald L. Dion. Lighting by Stu Perlmutter. Costumes by Elizabeth E. Tustian. With Karen Binder, Robert De Vivo, John Greiner-Ferris, Kimberly McClure, Michael Roberts, Shannon Connolly, JoAnne Powers, Christian Potts, Rich White, and Ray Johnson. At Beatrice Herford's Vokes Theatre, Wayland, through July 31.

When theater lovers speak of how good American high comedy can be, most of them are thinking in terms of Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story

-- and especially of the movie version that George Cukor directed in 1940, a year after the play opened on Broadway and resurrected Katharine Hepburn's career. Hepburn's movies had been losing money, so RKO dropped her option; Barry had written the role of Tracy Lord, the iron-bound Philly debutante on the verge of a second marriage, especially for her, so she returned to the New York theater to play it. It was a hit; when she flew back to Hollywood, it was to recreate the part for MGM, opposite Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart (in the roles that Joseph Cotton and Van Heflin, respectively, had played on stage).

I don't think The Philadelphia Story is Barry's best play; that would be Holiday, which Hepburn and Grant also starred in when it was made into a movie (the second time around). Holiday is sublime; The Philadelphia Story is merely enchanting. Yet it rarely gets revived, which makes the new production at Vokes an occasion. I don't think it's disappeared from the repertory just because the movie is so (justly) famous -- I haven't noticed any dearth of productions of A Streetcar Named Desire or Long Day's Journey into Night. It's mostly because Barry demands a distinctive style that, in the US, at least, we no longer prepare our actors for. In her introduction to a collection of high comedies by the screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, Pauline Kael remarks that actors are "no longer trained to be radiant"; that combination of high style and personal style belongs to an era long dead. True, there are performers who appear to have instinctually evolved: it's not hard to imagine David Hyde-Pierce and Christine Baranski in Noel Coward's Private Lives, or Blythe Danner in S.N. Behrman's End of Summer. But a whole cast of them? That would be a trick.

In Jennifer Lavin Howard's very enjoyable production of Barry's play, the women manage the style quite nicely, while the men race to try to catch up. Karen Binder makes a fine Tracy Lord; she has a crisp, ink-sketch presence that she can saturate with feeling at the right moment. JoAnne Powers gives a warm and occasionally touching performance as her mother, who has voted to forgive a philandering husband (Rich White); and Kimberly McClure is both buoyant and sharp-witted as the photographer, Liz Embrie, one of two journalists sent by a scandal sheet to cover Tracy's wedding. And Shannon Connolly is simply remarkable as Tracy's precocious kid sister Dinah. But of the men, only Robert De Vivo as Tracy's ex, C.K. Dexter Haven (the Cary Grant role), has a real ear for Barry's language, which is both brittle and perfumed -- and even De Vivo is a trifle self-conscious. The other males in the cast (White; John Greiner-Ferris as Mike Connor, the writer who falls for Tracy despite his prejudice against the rich; Christian Potts as her brother Sandy -- a role eliminated in the movie) look their parts but aren't always able to handle the combination of physical and vocal grace on which Barry relies.

I've excepted Michael Roberts as George Kittredge because it's really Barry himself who does the actor in. Much as I adore Barry's best plays (I'd add The Animal Kingdom to the short list), they all contain the same flaw, which derives, ironically, from the ingenious way he structures them. In all three, the protagonist is engaged to someone who is his or her obvious spiritual inferior (in The Animal Kingdom, he goes so far as to marry her). Yet the mistake is obvious to the audience; we wait for the hero to discover the kindred spirit who's been floating around the stage from the outset. I realize that many romantic comedies rely on this kind of error in judgment on the part of the main character, but in Barry's plays the error is extreme. George Kittredge is a humorless snob, and I don't know how you're supposed to play him. (John Howard, the movie's Kittredge, couldn't figure it out either.)

Barry probably thought he was giving Tracy what she deserved in George -- that is, until she could see the fault in her own judgment. The play is shaped, elegantly and movingly, as Tracy's emotional and psychological coming of age: she learns to be tolerant of weakness -- in her alcoholic first husband, her father, and even herself. It's a marvelous play, and it's to Howard's credit that you walk away feeling that it's been out of circulation far too long. The Saturday-night audience I sat among laughed and applauded, and at both intermissions they talked about the dialogue and the characters. I can't think of a higher compliment for theatergoers to pay a production.