I haven’t been a fan of the Mint Theater Company since I first saw one of their productions a good many years ago. (The earliest one for which I have a report was 2003’s Far and Wide by Arthur Schnitzler.) Their productions were well enough presented—decent acting, good tech, even competent directing—but I never found their selection of scripts worth spending a couple of hours on. The Mint’s mission is to find and produce “worthwhile plays from the past that have been lost or forgotten.” Here’s the problem I have with that pursuit, as I observed in a report on another Mint production (N. C. Hunter’s A Day by the Sea, 1953, posted on Rick On Theater on 17 September 2016; this report also includes a brief profile of the Mint Theater): “My sense about plays that have been forgotten or neglected has always been—and I’ve seldom been proved wrong—that most have been so for an excellent reason: they’re not very good.”
As a result of my poor experiences, I’ve avoided the Mint for the most part. Every now and then, however, something comes along that seems an interesting bit of (perhaps minor) theater history that I’m tempted to check out. So, when I got a mailing in July announcing that the Mint would be presenting a 1936 Lillian Hellman play, her second after her début hit, The Children’s Hour (1934; 691 performances and a 1961 movie starring Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine), I was intrigued enough to put aside my trepidations about my track record with Mint. I asked Diana, my frequent theater partner, if Days to Come interested her—despite its rather daunting track record (it closed after only seven performances on Broadway in December ’36), and she said she was, so I booked seats for the 7:30 performance on the evening of Friday, 31 August, and we met at the Samuel Beckett Theatre on Theatre Row.
The 1936 première of Days to Come opened on 15 December at the Vanderbilt Theatre on 48th Street, east of Broadway, and closed on 19 December. (The theater no longer exists, having been razed in 1954 for a parking structure.) The production was produced and directed by Herman Shumlin, but the cast contained no names I recognized. (William Harrigan played Andrew Rodman and Florence Eldridge was his wife, Julie; these were stars of the day—Harrigan’s father was Ned Harrigan of Harrigan & Hart—but unknown to me.) Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times wrote that Days to Come
is a bitter play, shot through with hatred and written with considerable heat. It is also one of the most elusive the season has set on the stage. For the topic of labor troubles is apparently one [Hellman] has not mastered yet. Although “Days to Come” is laboriously written and acted with dogged determination, it never once comes firmly to grips with any of the subjects it nudges in passing.
The Times reviewer concluded: “Making a spiritual tragedy out of a labor impasse is something Miss Hellman is not able to do. ‘Days to Come’ is fairly tortured by the effort of trying.” (I did warn Diana of the reception of the play in ’36.)
The 1978 Off-Off-Broadway revival at the WPA Theater (also now defunct) in what’s now called the Flatiron District fared better, though: Terry Curtis Fox of the Village Voice dubbed the play “very much worth seeing,” affirming that it “appears in retrospect to be a warm-up for her first masterpiece, The Little Foxes [1939].” Fox reported that “the writing is far more compelling and less explanatory than in her first play” and he found that Days “emerges as a far more interesting work than Children’s Hour.” (The production ran in October and November 1978 under the direction of R. Stuart White; Reno Roop played Andrew Rodman and Kaiulani Lee was his wife, Julie.)
The play is published in several editions (some no longer in print), but after the Broadway flop, Hellman slightly revised the script for a 1971 release (Collected Plays; Little, Brown and Company), condensing the original three acts into two. This is the text the WPA used for the 1978 OOB revival, and it’s the script the Mint is using for the current production. We’ll see soon where I come down on this 2018 revival.
Born in New Orleans, Hellman (1905-84) was raised in a Southern Jewish family. Her father was a traveling shoe salesman (a biographical fact Hellman shared with Tennessee Williams coincidentally), and her family moved between New Orleans and New York City. Attending New York University for two years and then taking some classes at Columbia University, Hellman worked at several literary jobs: reading manuscripts for the publisher Boni and Liveright and screenplays for MGM (another life fact also on Williams’s resumé). While at MGM, Hellman met detective writer Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) and they began a decades-long romance.
In 1932, Hellman returned to New York with Hammett (whom she never married but with whom she remained romantically involved until his 1961 death) and began working as a script-reader for Broadway producer and director Herman Shumlin (who would stage the ill-fated Broadway premiére of Days to Come). The tyro playwright showed Shumlin (1898-1979) a draft of The Children’s Hour, her first play to be staged in New York. He produced and directed it on Broadway, where it opened on 20 November 1934—Hellman was not yet 30—and ran for 691 performances.
The young dramatist immediately became one of Broadway’s bright lights, but then came Days, the failure of which upset Hellman so much she literally threw up backstage on opening night and didn’t look again at the script for 35 years. She came back with The Little Foxes (410 performances, produced and directed by Shumlin) and Watch on the Rhine (1941; 378 performances, produced and directed by Shumlin), The Autumn Garden (1951; 101 performances, produced by Kermit Bloomgarden and directed by Harold Clurman), Toys in the Attic (1960; 456 performances, produced by Bloomgarden and directed by Arthur Penn), and the book of the 1956 Leonard Bernstein musical Candide (73 performances, directed by Tyrone Guthrie).
Starting in the 1930s, Hellman was a pretty committed socialist and leftist radical. She famously defended her principles in 1952 when she was haled before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) during the communist witch-hunts and refused to name names: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” She was blacklisted in Hollywood, like her lover, Dashiell Hammett, and couldn’t work there until 1966.
Hellman published a bestselling series of memoirs, including An Unfinished Woman (1969) and Pentimento (1973), whose veracity was later called into question. The books inspired the 1977 film Julia starring Jane Fonda as Hellman. When novelist Mary McCarthy (1912-89) accused Hellman of being a “dishonest writer” the playwright famously sued her for libel in 1980. She died on Martha’s Vineyard on June 30, 1984, the lawsuit terminated unadjudicated. Many of her plays are often and popularly revived, the roles coveted by actresses across the country and abroad, and she is the namesake of the Lilly Awards, founded by playwrights Julia Jordan, Marsha Norman, and Theresa Rebeck in 2010 to honor women in theater .
The plot—or plots—of Days to Come is a bit of a tangled web. (We’ll see why shortly. Hellman herself, in the introduction to the 1942 publication of the text, acknowledged, “I wanted to say too much.”) I’ll try to keep it simple for now: Andrew Rodman (Larry Bull) is the hereditary owner of a brush factory in Callom, Ohio, a fictional small-town somewhere between Cleveland and Cincinnati. It’s a company town and all the residents of Callom depend on the brush factory for their livelihoods and the company depends on the town for its labor. Everything in this symbiosis has been working fine for three generations and everyone, the owners and the workers, all consider each other friends. Until . . .
The Great Depression (1929-39) has taken a toll. (I read a statistic that unemployment in Cleveland was 50%; in Toledo, it reached 80%!) The company’s bleeding red ink and Rodman, who’s mortgaged to the hilt—the family house, the factory, and maybe soon, his soul—to keep himself, his family, and the business afloat, won’t make a cheaper product or raise his prices to bring in more income. He’s instigated a 10-cent pay cut at the factory and the brush workers have gone out on strike in response, so no one’s earning anything. Talking hasn’t moved the needle, so Henry Ellicott (Ted Deasy), Rodman’s lawyer, best friend from childhood, and his biggest creditor (and, apparently, his wife’s lover), convinces the brush-maker to hire someone who can resolve the problem.
Naïve Rodman thinks Sam Wilkie (Dan Daily) and his “52 or 53” men are professional brush workers who’ll get the production line going again (i.e., scabs—but that issue isn’t addressed). Of course, everyone else on stage and in the audience knows before they even show up that they’re strike-breakers; Mossie Dowel (Geoffrey Allen Murphy) and Joe Easter (Evan Zes), who are staying in the Rodman house as “security” for the factory owners, are unmistakably a couple of thugs: Joe likes to pull a knife at the slightest provocation (or even no provocation); if they dragged their knuckles on the floor, it couldn’t be more obvious. (At least one reviewer saw the hand of Dashiell Hammet, who’d done a turn as a Pinkerton man one of who’s assignments was strike-breaking, in the characters of the strike-breakers.)
Rodman’s got a conscience and is concerned about his workers—he’s grown up with them, gone to school with them, visited them in their homes, and considers many of them his friends and vice versa—and as it dawns on him whom he’s hired and for what, he starts to waffle. But he’s a weakling and can’t take any action one way or the other. His sister, Cora (Mary Bacon), who lives in the house with him and his wife, is so self-centered and oblivious, she sees all this turmoil as a bother aimed at discomfiting her and her comfy routine. She thinks Wilkie and his men should do whatever is necessary to get the town back in order, with the social order intact. Ellicott not only agrees, but is Wilkie’s biggest supporter in Callom.
On the other side is Thomas Firth (Chris Henry Coffey), one of the factory workers who’s always seen Rodman as his friend as well as his employer—but now he can’t look after his wife and adopted daughter. Arrived in Callom to help organize the strike is young Leo Whalen (Roderick Hill), a sincere and honest union man who cautions hot-tempered Firth and the other workers not to fight the strike-breakers because that’s exactly what Wilkie (of whom he’s been a frequent adversary) wants. Wilkie’s gotten some of his thugs sworn in as police officers and they’re ready to swoop down on the strikers as soon as a fist is swung. Rodman’s wife, Julie (Janie Brookshire), as naïve and confused as her husband—not to mention a little lonely—is intrigued with, and not a little attracted to, Whalen (who, in Hill’s portrayal, couldn’t look more all-American and steadfast). She’s the monkey wrench about to fall into the works.
Early in the play, Joe, the goon who likes to play with knives, gets into a meaningless dispute with Mossie (who’s always cracking his knuckles, which irks Joe no end) and throws a knife at him, killing him. This takes place in the living room of the Rodmans, and Wilkie, instead of calling the cops, orders Joe to take Mossie’s body out and lose it. Ultimately, he’s dumped in the alley outside strike headquarters and Whalen is blamed for the murder. Except that Julie had been visiting Whalen in the strike office when the car with the body makes its deposit and roars off.
(I’m sure it’s unintentional on the parts of either director J. R. Sullivan or Hill, but at one moment in the strike office scene, Whalen stands on a chair, a hammer in his right hand and his arm thrust into the air. The pose he strikes evokes the many heroic workers in Soviet propaganda posters of the 1930s and ’40s. On second thought, though, it wasn’t really an organic move on Hill’s part—it’s a set-piece—so maybe it’s premeditated after all.)
Whalen is nevertheless arrested and held long enough to keep him away from the striking workers so that, without the organizer being around to wrangle them, they lose control under the strike-breakers’ constant baiting and a street brawl breaks out during which Firth’s young daughter is killed by a blow to her head from the truncheon of one of Wilkie’s enforcers. In his own eyes, this makes Rodman a murderer and he’s informed by Firth that he’s no longer safe in downtown Callom. The strike is broken, but Rodman has lost his friends and his town, and all but lost his business.
In the last scene, after having sent Wilkie and his crew packing, Rodman confronts Cora, Julie, and Ellicott, and all the family resentments and secrets come tumbling out in a tornado of confessional and recriminational speeches. Rodman has now lost his family as well. It’s a scorched-earth ending.
The worst offense of Days to Come is that it’s boring. It’s earnest and sincere—and hasn’t a single beat in its earnest and sincere little heart! The reason, I think—and this is my own guess—is that the subject, labor trouble and strike-breaking in a company town, isn’t something with which Hellman was at all personally acquainted. She did a lot of research, spending two months, according to Mint’s dramaturgical advisor, in the small Ohio towns between Cincinnati and Cleveland, focusing on Wooster, Ohio, a town of about 11,000 in 1930 located 50 miles south of Cleveland; it was home to the Wooster Brush Company founded in 1851 by Adam Foss. The playwright interviewed factory workers, owners, townspeople, officials, and so on—but she didn’t know any of those people and she wasn’t personally invested in any of them. Intellectually, yes; politically, sure—but not personally. None of the characters is human, so none is sympathetic.
Hellman also wasn’t sure in the end what she was writing, a Waiting for Lefty labor drama or a Virginia Woolf/Delicate Balance (or Little Foxes) family melodrama. Three quarters of the play is the former, all contrived circumstances to make a labor conflict, with stock characters from that kind of story; the final quarter is the latter, and all speeches and monologues shouted at each other by the four family members. It pretty much comes out of nowhere, too. (The Village Voice said of the 1978 Off-Off-Broadway revival that it seemed to be a prep for Little Foxes; I suspect this scene is what the reviewer was responding to. If you want to check me out, see my report on that play, posted on 13 May 2017.) In a New York Herald Tribune interview a few days before the Broadway première, Hellman said, “It’s the family I’m interested in principally; the strike and social manifestations are just backgrounds,” but what’s on stage looks more like she tacked this focus on as an afterthought rather than the main interest.
Despite ending the labor plot before getting to the family intrigue, nothing is really resolved, either. Some terrible things happen during the strike-breaking plot, but it’s all just swept away to clear the decks for the last scene. (Effectively, Rodman just sends everyone home. This ends the labor plot, but doesn’t conclude it.) Then, after 20 minutes or so of everyone yelling recriminations at everyone else, the family mess also just ends without resolving anything. I was left wondering how any of these people could go on living, especially in the same small town, after the events of the play, both the labor conflict and the family drama. Brooks Atkinson in 1936 said that the play “never once comes firmly to grips with any of the subjects it nudges in passing.” This seems to be what he meant.
I also had a particular problem with one character, but I don’t know if it’s the playwright’s fault, the actor’s, or the director’s. It’s probably all three. I’m talking about Cora Rodman, Andrew’s sister. For most of the play, Bacon plays her as a silly fool, a sort of Betty Boop in a serious situation—all fluttering arms and hands and little-girl voice. She always seemed to be in a different play from her castmates. Then at the end, she turns serious and fierce—still way off base, but now more scary, the kind of woman who’d defend the Nazis in the months to come for stabilizing Germany and taking those nasty outsiders in hand. (Bacon’s physical behavior was still a flibbertigibbet, which struck me as incongruous.) Cora’s split personality was emblematic of the play itself. (A couple of reviewers were of the opinion that Hellman separated the two aspects of Cora’s personality into the more dramatically satisfying Regina Giddens and Birdie Hubbard of Little Foxes.)
To determine if, like Jessica Rabbit, Cora was just drawn this way, or if it’s an invention of the actor or director, or both in collusion—or all three, I’d have had to have been a fly on the wall in the rehearsal room. All the other characters and performers are straightforward and direct, though they’re all clichés to one extent or another and none of the actors found a way out of that cul-de-sac. Director Sullivan didn’t help them, either. (The Mint doesn’t seem to have a policy of “fixing” the oldies they mount—though they did cut Schnitzler’s Das weite Land from four hours to 2½ and from 29+ characters to 11 for Far and Wide—which may be honorable or it may be foolish.) As a result, though there isn’t anything technically wrong with any of the performances, none is engaging or moving. It’s more like a social studies role-play than a stage drama.
I’ll say much the same thing about the Mint’s physical production for Days. Andrea Varga’s mid-West Depression-era costumes are fine, all looking exactly like what Hellman’s types should be wearing; Joshua Yocom’s furniture and set decorations (this is a very proppy show) all look like what a wealthy Ohio factory-owner would have in his home. (I’m always amazed at how much Art Deco stuff can still be found around—although some of it might be revivalist reproductions. And how come Rodman’s father in the portrait over the sideboard looks like Anton Chekhov without his pince-nez? Is that a dog-whistle to Hellman or something?) Jane Shaw’s sound design, which produces a very realistic rainstorm and the frightening sounds of off-stage violence from the workers’ confrontation with the strike-breakers, also includes jazz-era music between the scenes and during intermission to help establish and maintain the period feeling.
Harry Feiner’s set design, which consists principally of the living room of the Rodman house with a brief visit to the storefront office of strike headquarters, also looks appropriate as well as practical, with a small desk for Rodman at the stage-right side of the living room, and large French doors leading to a garden upstage. The problem isn’t with the look, or even the space left for the actors (sometimes four or five in a scene) on the small Beckett stage, but the lack of facility for changing the sets for the many scenes (there are five in the two acts). Now, only two set-changes are also changes of location (from the Rodman living room to the strike office and back again), and that necessitates a small set to fold out at stage left and fold back in, but all the other scene-changes require the manual resetting of numerous props, all by the stage crew (and a few of the actors) each time. All of this takes time, slowing the already sluggish production to a virtual standstill. (The two-hour production might have come down to 1:45 or even less without the time-consuming scene shifts.)
The cause of this, I assume, is that the Beckett doesn’t have the technical capacity for quick scene-changes—no fly-space and inadequate wings—in which case, Sullivan and Feiner ought to have devised a production that doesn’t need this facility. (The 99-seat Beckett with its 34'-by-24' stage is Mint’s home theater these days; they know by now what it can handle and what it can’t.)
I’ve said pretty much all I need to about Sullivan’s staging. He handles the production adequately, given the script, but doesn’t enhance its appeal or solve its textual deficiencies. Everything that’s wring with Days to Come shows up on stage. I will compliment fight director Rod Kinter, though, for one of the best bits of stage violence I’ve ever seen—the knifing of Mossie. However meaningless the act itself is, it’s executed excellently. Whatever Kinter devised, actors Zes (who threw) and Murphy (who “caught”) performed it perfectly.
On the basis of 27 published reviews, Show-Score gave Days to Come a low average rating of 61 (as of 2 September). Thirty-three percent of the notices were positive, a relatively low tally; 45% of the reviews were mixed and 22% were negative. The highest score in the website was only 85, shared by four on-line notices (The Clyde Fitch Report, Show Showdown, More Than The Play Blog, Broadway Journal), followed by one 80 (Stage Left); Show-Score’s lowest-rated reviews were two 40’s (Village Voice, New York Stage Review) backed up by three 45’s (Broadway Blog, New York Times, Woman Around Town). My survey will comprise 17 reviews.
(The press turn-out was very light. The Times was the only daily paper to review Days and the now-defunct Village Voice was the only other newspaper to cover the show. The New Yorker was the only other print outlet to run a review; all the rest were on-line review sites.)
In the Times (which received the second-lowest Show-Score rating of 45), Laura Collins-Hughes dubbed Days to Come a “sprawling, centerless” and “overloaded play.” She asserted that “there is more life in it than the Mint staging finds” in its “mishmash of acting styles in a tonally uneven production that rarely wipes the dust of decades from the text.” Collins-Hughes continued, “The odd thing is the abstractness of [Hellman's] perspective,” observing, “We meet just a single worker, Andrew’s old friend Thomas Firth . . ., and we never do get much sense of the town that’s so dear to Andrew.” Singling out four of the main cast members, the Times reviewer felt that the actors are “hamstrung by a performance style straight out of period movies.” Of the script, Collins-Hughes suggested, “Opened up on the screen, it might have blossomed. Onstage in this revival, it simply wilts.”
In what was one of the Village Voice’s last theater notices (the paper ceased publication on 31 August; the Days review came out on the 28th), Miichael Sommers, referring to the play’s “debacle” of a première 80 years ago, declared, “For some inexplicable reason, Days to Come has been dug up by the Mint Theater Company” and affirmed that “this stiff deserves to remain buried,” adding, “Nor is the production up to the Mint’s typical standard.” (Sommers’s review received one of Show-Score’s two 40’s, the production’s lowest score.) The Voice writer explained that “the drama’s components of outside agitations and indoor intrigues do not hold together. In her efforts to explore and meld both social issues and personal messes, Hellman satisfies neither the larger nor the intimate sides of the story.” Sommers complained that Hellman’s “writing is curiously lacking” and that Sullivan directs “somewhat stiffly,” adding, “The acting is also uneven.” “Constrained by the underwritten quality of their characters,” Sommers felt that some of the actors give “wan portrayals.”
In the New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” column, Ken Marks labeled the Mint revival of Days “worthy,” which, directed with a “fine” cast, “stands on its own.” Marks characterized the play as “a gripping, lucid examination of the dangerous intersection of economic, social, and personal forces, even though, with the entrance of the strikebreakers, the action turns pulpy for a stretch, like a Jimmy Cagney movie.”
On the Broadway Journal (which earned the play’s highest rating on Show-Score, one of four 85’s), James Feinberg insisted that the fault for Days to Come’s failure in 1939 “certainly wasn’t the writing.” Characterizing the Mint’s revival as “well-acted” and “smoothly directed,” Feinberg labeled it “a fascinating family drama” which “makes a compelling case for the play’s continued relevance.” The Broadway Journalist offered his interpretation:
The play’s applicability to today’s political situation, therefore, works by contrast: In the Trump era, when every individual act is seen as either resistance or implicit support, the personal is the political; in Days To Come, the political is the personal.
“The great success of this crisp production is the sympathy it engenders for its somewhat hapless characters,” asserted Feinberg, “largely . . . because Sullivan allows the interpersonal drama to bleed through the social commentary.” In the end, the reviewer found, “Days to Come poses big questions to which its characters do not know the answers, and perhaps never will.”
Robert Russo of Stage Left (which received an 80 rating from Show-Score) described the play as “[f]reely flowing across categories and genres” and found the revival a “finely-acted production.” He understood why the play may have “confused” audiences in ’36, observing that it “vacillates between melodramatic, realistic, and hard-boiled qualities” while it “ambitiously—and quite successfully—captures both the local and global scene of its conflict, tying the interpersonal struggles of boss and worker with family, community, and country.” Russo felt that “while the small-town vision of worker and boss as friends seems more and more remote with each passing year, the labor dynamics on display throughout the play . . . are familiar, and deeply relevant.” He found the theme “an essential, exciting, and refreshing conflict to see on stage and ruminate upon afterward.”
Stanford Friedman described the Mint revival of Days as “earnest” on Front Row Center (he posted the same notice on New York Theatre Guide) in which the director and company “breathe new life into” what he noted had been “a clunker” in 1936. Friedman reported that the presentation, “boasting top notch production values and veteran actors, . . . is highly watchable, if not highly relatable” despite “many familiar elements in the mix.” The FRC reviewer affirmed that “the melodramatic turns and existential crises of the night ultimately keep us at a distance.” In the end, Friedman acknowledged that “the collective weight of everyone’s personal problems overshadow the play’s two murders and overwhelm its labor strife subplot.”
Broadway World’s Michael Dale mused that “if Clifford Odets’ landmark pro-union drama, WAITING FOR LEFTY, hadn’t opened the year before, . . . DAYS TO COME . . . might have been better received” (though I doubt it). Dale reported that the “very fine production is played out on a splendid set,” but concluded, “Alternating between family drama and Depression-era labor issues, DAYS TO COME, serves neither satisfactorily, but it’s still a worthy venture for the Mint, and an intriguing curiosity for audiences.” Mark Dundas Wood on Stage Buddy felt that the Mint’s Days was played “briskly” and that director Sullivan “presents a sharp and smart little play.” Wood observed, “There’s something appealingly noir-ish in Days—especially in one sexually charged scene between” labor organizer Whalen and Julie Rodman, but the “cast is uneven.” He reported that the play was “originally under-esteemed, but, unfortunately, [is] no long-dormant masterwork.”
On TheaterMania, Zachary Stewart called Days “[w]ell-staged and smartly acted” but cautioned that “it still leaves us underwhelmed by a script that bites off more than it can chew.” Emphasizing that the play “isn’t just the story of laboring Davids versus a capitalist Goliath,” Stewart asserted, “Hellman thrillingly eschews simplistic agitprop, fully humanizing her characters.” The TM reviewer, however, observed that the play’s “expansive scope” is “a lot to pack into two hours” and “is . . . the play’s undoing.” He continued, “Not only does it dilute focus, but the linguistic labor and dramatic contrivance required to set up all of Hellman’s dominoes ensures a long and often painfully dull process before they can be knocked down.” On the other hand, Stewart asserted, “This middling dramatization of an extraordinary concept is given a top-notch production.” In the end, the review-writer found, “Unfortunately, Days to Come is neither as funny or tragic as it has the potential to be.”
Jonathan Mandell, noting on New York Theater the failure of Days to Come on Broadway, warned that the revival “doesn’t make a convincing case that the initial audience was shortsighted, nor that the play was somehow before its time” despite “the company’s usual fine acting and first-rate production values.” Some scenes “should play more humorously than they do,” and the play ends “with an abrupt and contrived convergence of the disparate conflicts,” giving “short-shrift to” all of them. Mandell summed up his view of Days by stating:
Some have argued that Hellman’s divided focus in “Days to Come” is meant to show us the connection between private morality and public policy. This sounds right to me. Indeed, for all its structural flaws, the play is replete with issues that still resonate, in one form or another. While witnessing the dilemma between the two old friends in a small Ohio town, the factory owner and the worker, I couldn’t help thinking about how our current day political polarization has threatened the relationships of old friends and family, in Ohio, and everywhere else.
On Theatre Reviews Limited, David Roberts observed that while the labor plot of Days is “unremarkable,” the play has a “more dynamic storyline driven by Hellman’s complex characters and their authentic, relevant conflicts.” Roberts found, “Betrayal, criminality, deceit, murder, gluttony, and prevarication abound, and these are the themes that resonate with the current socio-political environment,” but also felt, “The important themes of Lillian Hellman’s play and the rich, enduring questions it raises are unfortunately overshadowed by the production.” He explained that “the performances are weak, and the direction seems uneven.” He wondered, “Why most of the characters become caricatures is puzzling and problematic” when the cast is “fully capable of delivering engaging and believable performances.” “Moral strength battles moral depravity in” Days to Come, declared the TRL reviewer, but lamented, “That battle of the Titans gets lost in the Mint Theater production . . . and . . . falls flat.”
CurtainUp’s Elyse Sommer pronounced the Mint’s revival of Days a “handsomely staged production” that leads to a “melodramatic and somber denouement.” Sommer, however, complained that Hellman “complicates the plot with too many issues, and fails to have the characters connect believably and smoothly.” She affirmed, “And that hasn’t changed in this revival.” Of the stage work, the CU reviewer found, “Director J. R. Sullivan works hard, but not often enough successfully so, to weave all these plot strands together and help the actors clarify what makes them tick. But a cast just one short of a full dozen and this wide ranging story make it hard for them to make strong impressions.”
Victor Gluck of TheaterScene.net labeled Days to Come an “overheated drama” that’s “all over the place with each character offering a new plot line.” He explained, “It is not so much that the play is unfocused but that there are too many stories” because, despite the time Hellman took to develop it, “the play still seems to have a great deal of undigested material.” Furthermore, Gluck found that “Sullivan has been unable to decide on the tone or style of the play so that some actors seem miscast and others misdirected.” In the end, Gluck wrote, “Days to Come is an example of a worthy, lost play whose problems haven’t yet been solved—if they ever will.”
Despite the fact that Days to Come “is filled with social and political significance that might have had more impact and make more of a statement in the current climate,” on Theater Pizzazz, Sandi Durell observed that “it spends too much time on the intricacies of the family and too little time on the plight of the working class.” In addition, the TP reviewer found that “J. R. Sullivan does a brilliant job directing, but even he can’t undo the long-winded repetitive conversations, and many times slow moving rhetoric . . . of a very poorly written play with some good and not so good performances,” dubbing the revival a “valiant effort.”
In the second of three reviews receiving Show-Score’s second-lowest rating (45), Samuel L. Leiter of Broadway Blog noted that Hellman passed the blame around for the play’s 1936 failure, including “production issues,” but the Broadway Blogger noted that “technical problems aren’t notable in the play’s physically attractive new revival.” He added, “But the acting and directing would surely make Hellman’s enemies list.” Calling the performances “skin-deep,” Leiter said the “dull, conventional acting” didn’t dig “deeply enough to strike a more than a one-dimensional note.” Labeling the revival “stodgy, lethargic,” he declared that it “falls far short.” “Spottily cast,” Leiter continued, “the production is splattered with awkward blocking.” Quoting John Anderson’s 1936 review in the New York Journal-American, the review-writer reported that director Sullivan’s mounting is “muddled and incoherent, dreary, laborious, and overwrought.”
On Talkin’ Broadway, the third 45 on Show-Score, Michael Portantiere cautioned that Days, “which spends comparatively little time dealing with the plight of the striking workers and, instead, devolves for much of its length into a poorly written domestic drama—or, rather, melodrama,” “is no unearthed treasure.” Furthernore, Portantiere said, “Probably due to both the flawed writing and a lack of strong guidance from director J.R. Sullivan, the Mint production of Days to Come is inconsistently well acted.” The TB reviewer concluded, “The Mint staging should be seen if only for its rarity,” but added that “in the canon of management-labor conflict plays ranging from Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty to Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, and including the operatic The Cradle Will Rock as well as such lighter-fare musicals as The Pajama Game and Newsies, this one ranks pretty low on the satisfaction meter.”
Melissa Rose Bernardo labeled Days “definitely a disappointing head-scratcher” on New York Stage Review (the second of the two lowest-scoring notices on Show-Score, rating a 40), adding, “And the Mint Theater Company’s current production doesn’t make a convincing case for its resurrection.” As Bernardo sees it,
The biggest problem, apologies to Ms. Hellman, is simply the play itself, which, even almost 100 years on, is in the midst a major identity crisis. It’s about a strike at a brush factory, but we never go inside the factory or see the picket line. It’s about the class differences between the factory owners . . . and the workers—but we meet only one worker . . ., plus a union organizer . . . . It’s about a husband and wife . . . who hardly see each other and talk to each other even less. . . . In short, it’s a play about a lot of things.
“Using the strike as a backdrop is fine, if curious, choice,” declared the NYSR writer—"as long as something in the foreground is compelling and eye-catching. And none of these characters are.” She reported that “the Mint has supplied a handsome production,” but lamented that “the acting is surprisingly uneven.” In the end, Bernardo observed, “The Mint has built its brand on mining diamonds in the rough and polishing them to gleaming perfection,” then concluded, “But some stones should just be left underground.”
