'The Traveling Lady'

Diana, my usual theater companion, and I went into Greenwich Village last night to see the Cherry Lane Theatre’s revival of Horton Foote’s The Traveling Lady, a 1954 play.  Some readers may know the play from the 1965 Columbia Pictures film adaptation, Baby the Rain Must Fall, which starred Steve McQueen and Lee Remick.  Otherwise, it’s pretty obscure, I think.  Like Roads to Home, which we saw at the Cherry Lane back in October (see my report, posted on ROT on 22 October 2016), Traveling Lady is part of the celebration of Foote’s 100th birthday last year.  The production is also the second of the Cherry Lane’s Founder’s Projects, a collaboration with “mature theater-makers” who have “helped shape Off-Broadway.”  (The first Founder’s Project was last year’s production of Israel Horovitz’s Out of the Mouths of Babes.)  A coproduction of CLT and La Femme Theatre Productions, the revival started performances on 7 June and officially opened on 22 June; Traveling Lady was supposed to close on 16 July, but it was extended two weeks and will now run through 30 July.  Diana and I saw the 7 p.m. performance on Friday, 23 June, the evening after opening.

La Femme Theatre Productions, as the name suggests, focuses on plays “with significant roles for women.”  Founded in 2013 (incorporated in 2015) by Jean Lichty, who plays the female lead here; Austin Pendleton, who directs this revival; and Robert Dohmen, a businessman and benefactor of theater, past La Femme productions have included Ingmar Bergman’s Nora (an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House, co-produced with CLT, 2015), Rocket to the Moon by Clifford Odets (associate producer with the Peccadillo Theater Company; Drama Desk nominee, 2015), and William Inge’s A Loss of Roses (co-produced with Peccadillo; Wall Street Journal’s Best Theater of 2014).  (For a brief profile of the Cherry Lane Theatre, see my Roads to Home report.)

The première of The Traveling Lady was presented by the Playwright’s Company at Broadway’s Playhouse Theatre (137 W. 48th Street) in 1954—for just 30 performances.  Directed by Vincent J. Donehue, it starred Kim Stanley as Georgette Thomas and Jack (“Book ’im, Danno”) Lord as Slim Murray.  The first New York revival of Traveling Lady, reduced by Foote from a three-act play to a one-act, was staged by the Ensemble Studio Theatre in 2006, in association with Baylor University of Waco, Texas (where the production was born in 2004 as part of the university’s Horton Foote festival).  It had a professional New York cast but was staged by the Baylor University theater director.  In 1957, Robert Mulligan directed an abridged adaptation of the play for live television on CBS’s Studio One in Hollywood with Stanley repeating her lauded Broadway role, Robert Loggia as Henry, and Steven Hill as Slim (available on YouTube); Stanley repeated her performance in 1958 for Armchair Theatre on ABC.  The Columbia Pictures film Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965), based on The Travelling Lady, was also directed by Mulligan with Steve McQueen as Henry Thomas, Don Murray as Slim, and Lee Remick as Georgette.  (The report on The Roads to Home includes a bio sketch of the playwright.)

The story of The Traveling Lady takes place in the small town of Harrison, Texas, in 1950.  Georgette Thomas (Jean Lichty, founder of La Femme), the title character, and Margaret Rose (Korinne Tetlow), her small daughter, arrive in the back yard of Clara Breedlove (Angelina Fiordellisi, artistic director of CLT) looking for a house to rent from Judge Robedaux (George Morfogen).  Georgette expects to be meeting her husband, Henry (PJ Sosko), who, she believes, is about to be released from the state penitentiary in Huntsville.  During the six years of Henry’s imprisonment, Georgette had worked and saved to obtain the money to help her husband obtain a pardon, and now she’s in Harrison, where Henry grew up and where people remember him, to wait for him to join her and their daughter.  She quickly learns Henry’s been free for a month and working for Mrs. Tillman (Jill Tanner), a neighbor of Clara’s.

Slim Murray (Larry Bull), Clara’s brother and a widowed deputy sheriff who had an unhappy marriage, swiftly becomes very fond of Georgette and little Margaret Rose, and offers to go look for Henry.  When Henry finally appears, he suggests he go look for a house for the little family and after greeting his wife (with a handshake!) and the daughter he’s never seen—he and Georgette were married only six months when he was jailed for killing a man in a drunken fight—he disappears again, deserting Georgette and Margaret Rose.  As hours pass and Henry doesn’t return, Slim once again goes in search of him.

Mrs. Tillman, a temperance activist who befriended Henry and weaned him off drink, rushes in in tears, reporting that Henry has gotten drunk and robbed her of cash, her silverware, and a black “traveling bag.”  He’s made an attempt to skip town with the bag of loot, but when Mrs. Mavis (Lynn Cohen, who played the role in the 2006 Off-Broadway revival), the aged (and decidedly dotty) mother of Clara’s neighbor Sitter (Karen Ziemba), spots Henry on the lam and  grabs his bag, the thief follows the old lady back to Clara’s yard where he’s confronted by Slim and captured.  Slim turns Henry over to the Sheriff (Ron Piretti), but when the thief asks to say goodbye to his wife and daughter, Slim and the Sheriff inexplicably drive him out to Clara’s house—and then remove his handcuffs.  As you probably can guess, instead of embracing Georgette and Margaret Rose, he runs off with the sheriff in pursuit.  Georgette realizes that she can’t stick with her husband and decides to leave Harrison on a bus for the coast, where a boom means there are jobs available.  Slim, meanwhile, has taken a new job—he’s suffered a little from wanderlust ever since his wife died and can’t stay put for long—managing a cotton gin in “the Valley.”  He confesses to Georgette that he’s already in love with her and suggests she and Margaret Rose ride with him and find work in the Rio Grande Valley instead.  With little prodding, she decides to take Slim up on his offer.

Foote’s romanticized tale of starting over and second chances runs an intermissionless hour and 45 minutes.  At its center is Foote’s perpetual theme of yearning for home, whether a character’s familiar one from his past or a new one in which she can start over.  At the same time, Traveling Lady is a snapshot of a time (the middle of the 20th century) and place (small town Texas Gulf coast)—originally written while it was still extant, but now aglow with nostalgia and the scent of chinaberry blossoms and the flicker of fireflies.  The feeling that the playwright actually knew all of these people is palpable.

The Traveling Lady is decidedly not one of the playwright’s best works, but it has a lot of his signature bits in it.  For one thing, it’s set in Harrison, Texas, the fictional stand-in for Foote’s hometown of Wharton.  There are also some stories told, a hallmark of Foote’s dramaturgy, many of them providing atmosphere of the time and place without being directly pertinent to the plot.  (One or two relate background of Henry’s youth in Harrison.  The play opens while the funeral of the woman who raised him is going on in the cemetery across from Clara’s back yard; Henry was at the burial.)  All the characters except Georgette and her daughter are long-time friends or acquaintances; they come and go to each other’s houses and yards as if they all lived together in some South Texas commune.  Mrs. Mavis goes just about anywhere she pleases—with Sitter shouting after her.  (That’s another of Foote’s signatures: eccentrics and the tetched are treated as part of the environment.)  Just when the plot sends someone off to look for another character, she or he magically shows up.  Or vice versa: a character wanders in just before someone else  enters looking for him or her.  (An alternative title for the play might be Everybody Comes to Clara’s.  “Of all the backyards in all the towns in all the world . . . .”)  It’s a neat little package—maybe too neat.   If it weren’t all so warm and human—sentimental, a detractor might say—it would come off as contrived.  But that’s all old-style Foote. 

Readers of this blog will know that the only review of a play I’m about to see that I read beforehand is in the New York Times.  If anyone read Jesse Green’s review on the day I went to the Cherry Lane, you got an idea about the production.  (I’ll summarize this review, like the others, in the last section of my report as usual.)  I’d say Green was harsher than the production deserves—though maybe not the play—but he’s always pretty hard on plays.  (He’s also a bit of a contrarian.)  In addition, he probably saw the play in a preview, which means it may not have been quite fully baked.  There were still line flubs on that second night (second-night slump?), but the acting was not bad—though not spectacular by any means, and not as good as Roads to Home, the Foote play Diana and I saw in October.  (Hallie Foote was in that, and you can’t beat her when it comes to playing her dad’s women!  Well, of course, she is one of her dad’s women, so to speak!)  I will say that 6-year-old Korinne Tetlow, who played the little girl—she gives her age in her bio—was perhaps the best actor in the cast.  She was perfect without being precocious.  

The production itself is adequate—a serviceable set by Harry Feiner (who also lit it) and perfectly appropriate costumes by Theresa Squire (with wigs by Paul Huntley—on whom I ran a Washington Post article in a post entitled “Two (Back) Stage Pros,” 30 June 2014).  Timesman Green described the set as “overstuffed” and “too literal” and on the Cherry Lane’s small stage, perhaps it seems that way (especially if the reviewer saw the show in previews and the actors weren’t used to the furniture yet, as he suggested), but I didn’t find it a serious problem.  Green also pointed out the backdrop of “receding telephone poles,” prairie grass, and mismatched street lamps, but that, too, seems routinely apt to me.  A touch of atmospheric realism was provided by Ryan Rumery’s sounds of far-off train whistles, music from the Mexican dance hall nearby, and the occasional tinkle of wind chimes.  (Rumery also composed the two tunes that Henry, a wannabe country singer, sings; Henry’s supposed to be an alluring singer, though Sosko doesn’t have the voice to make this credible.)  It all provides an environment for the acting, but never actually establishes a world for the play that’s more than merely generic.  I remember scenery from that same era, the ’50s, on Cape Cod that looked exactly like that! 

Pendleton’s directing also falls into the utilitarian category.  He moves the actors around the set to keep the play in some motion—as in many Foote plays, the characters tend to find places to sit and tell stories a lot, which can become static if the director doesn’t find reason to get them up now and then—but it’s not really revelatory movement (except for the one fight between Slim and Henry, choreographed by Ron Piretti, who also plays the Sheriff).  I also found Pendleton’s use  of the center aisle as an entrance and exit bothersome—it may have been necessary because of the Cherry Lane’s configuration (though none of the previous productions I’ve seen there needed to use it), but it didn’t fit the production’s otherwise lyrically realistic performance style.  While the blocking doesn’t descend to the level of unmotivated crosses—Pendleton’s too good for that—it’s hardly theatrically stimulating staging. 

Like most Foote plays (and many others I’ve seen this season), Traveling Lady has an ensemble cast.  Now, in an ensemble show, no one is supposed to stand out as a star performer, even when some roles, like Georgette, say, in Traveling Lady, are more central to the story than others.  That works fine in this production.  But there still should be a glimmer of individuality in each performance, a core of special humanity that makes each character glow and sparkle.  That was missing in the CLT/La Femme production.  Except, as I noted, for Korinne Tetlow’s Margaret Rose—probably because 6-year-olds still have that total belief in what they’re doing when they play-act—which is precisely why Uta Hagen warned about acting with children: they’ll upstage the adults every time.  I should also make note of addled old Mrs. Mavis, who’s so precisely drawn as to be perhaps actor-proof.  In any case, Lynn Cohen nails her Sophia Petrillo spikiness.  It’s something of a cliché now—the old woman who has no speech filter—but in 1954 . . . well, Golden Girls was still 30 years in the future.  No one does anything actually wrong, but the ensemble just never quite sparks to full-on life.  One consequence of this is that I had trouble keeping the three matrons in the cast—Angelina Fiordellisi’s Clara, Jill Tanner’s Mrs. Tillman, and Karen Ziemba’s Sitter Mavis—sorted out.

(Karen Ziemba as Sitter Mavis had some lines about not ever having learned to dance and how her life would have been better if only she had.  ROTters may remember that Ziemba won a Tony in 2000 for Contact, a dance play at Lincoln Center.  Amusing!  Beginning on 5 July, Ziemba will leave Traveling Lady to begin rehearsals for the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Prince of Broadway, opening in August at the Great White Way’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.  She’ll be replaced by Emmy and Golden Globe nominee Annette O’Toole.)

Show-Score calculated an average score of 75 on the basis of 24 published reviews (as of 30 June).  The site’s highest score was 90 (five, including the Wall Street Journal, TheaterMania, and the Huffington Post), backed up by five 85’s; the low score was a single 45 (on Theater Pizzazz), the sole negative notice.  The reviews broke down into 67% positive, 29% mixed, and 4% negative.  My coverage will include 14 reviews.

Judd Hollander of Epoch Times dubbed Traveling Lady a “rather sweet slice of Americana” which reveals “the easy camaraderie between the townspeople of Harrison, all of whom feel like old acquaintances.”  Hollander noted that “90 percent of [the play] has the characters sitting in Clara’s backyard talking, in a smooth, leisurely pace,” but caviled that “some of the scene transitions . . . feel a bit awkward.”  Nonetheless, “Feiner’s set design works quite well.”  The reviewer concluded, “Despite a few missteps, ‘The Traveling Lady’ is [quite] the pleasant experience, with the show offering a gently layered look at a time when the world moved a little slower.” 

In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout called the play “among the most tenderly poignant of the soft-spoken studies of small-town life in which Horton Foote specialized” and observed that it “has had its ups and downs—mostly the latter.”  Labeling the production a “lovely revival,” Teachout announced, “I feel certain that Mr. Foote himself would have delighted in the perfect stylistic unanimity of” the staging of Pendleton, “who has a knack for making smart things happen in small theaters.”  (“He’s done it again,” exults the WSJ reviewer.)  Pendleton “has staged ‘The Traveling Lady’ with a gentle understatement that draws you in before you know it,” reported Teachout, and the performers “exude a feeling of community so strong as to create the impression that they’ve known one another for years, maybe decades.”  They “are excellent without exception” and deliver “persuasive performances.”

The Times’ Green affirmed that the characterizations imbue Traveling Lady with “a tone as old-fashioned as it is heartbreaking,” largely because it’s “built on what people could not bring themselves to say” in contrast to the argumentativeness of “the dominant mode of stage realism today.”  “Quaint and baggy,” according to Green, The Traveling Lady “is no great drama,” especially in contrast to the contemporaneous The Trip to Bountiful (a report on a 2005 revival of which I posted on ROT on 25 May 2013).  As I indicated above,  Green also didn’t think the production is “great,” either, with “some of the play’s best qualities . . .  muddied by performances that seem shaky and flat.”  Nonetheless, the  play “still emerges as a lovely specimen of the form, in which hope and regret run neck and neck, and repression is honed to an oaken luster.”  Pendleton’s staging, however, “only intermittently achieves the paradoxical merger of vast emotion and delicate expression that Foote requires.”  Green noted that “to get the fullest pang out of Foote’s plays . . . you need a production that gets past the competencies of the scene-study class,” but lamented, “Perhaps it is an impossible task to prevent this play, with its interior dividedness, from imploding.”

Dan Callahan called The Traveling Lady “a piece of writing on a deliberately small scale” in the Village Voice, and asserted that “Pendleton has succeeded admirably by keeping his actors at a medium-rare level of intensity.”  The Voice reviewer complained that “Foote’s intention here seems somewhat overly concerned with explaining poor behavior and assorted other problems through bad parenting, a tendency symptomatic of a certain strain in Fifties writing for theater, film, and television” and (like several other review-writers) compared Lichty’s performance unfavorably with Kim Stanley’s. (This strikes me as somewhat unfair since, though Stanley’s 1957 TV Georgette is available on video, few of us ordinary mortals are likely to have seen it.)  In the New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” column, the reviewer labeled The Traveling Lady a “sweet, slight comic drama” and reported that the production’s “atmospherics are perfect.”  He found, however, not “a lick of chemistry” between Bull’s Slim and Lichty’s Georgette.

Time Out New York’s Helen Shaw warned, “Horton Foote has a way of tiptoeing up on you”:

One moment, you’re feeling lulled and lazy by his plays’ drawling Texans, who are being all neighborly and living peaceful midcentury lives.  But as the play goes by, you’re suddenly awash in feeling: In his warm Chekhovian evenings, pain always arrives in Eden.

Calling La Femme’s production a “beautifully performed revival,” Shaw dubbed the play “a particularly well-shaped little jewel.”  The TONY reviewer asserted that Pendleton “has the most delicate directorial hands in the business” and paid lavish compliments to the cast.

James Wilson called Traveling Lady a “wistful play” with a “sense of movement and unrest” on Talkin’ Broadway and declared that Pendleton “has drawn some terrific performances from his ensemble.”  Despite an “exquisitely designed” set and individual performances that elicited high praise, however, Wilson found the play “somewhat heavy handed in its construction” and complained that “Pendleton undermines [that] atmospheric tranquility fairly regularly.”  (This reviewer, like me, found the entrances and exits through the auditorium “jarring.”)  Jonathan Mandell described the play as “poignant, gently amusing, and peopled with believable small-town characters who struggle and strive to be decent, not always successfully” on New York Theater, but admitted that “‘The Traveling Lady’ didn’t really kick in for me until the last third of the play” when the attraction between Georgette and Slim becomes clear.  As Mandell acknowledged, “If this production may have required more attentiveness than I was willing to give it, if it didn’t move me or amuse me as much I might have hoped, that may only be because Horton Foote is responsible for some of the best theater I’ve ever seen.”

On TheaterMania, Zachary Stewart labeled The Traveling Lady a “quietly powerful drama” and advised that “hyper-attentiveness is the best condition in which to take” it in.  “Under the sensitive and confident direction of Austin Pendleton,” asserted Stewart, “the play slowly cooks like a stew, its aroma wafting over the audience.”  The director, the TM reviewer said, “lets us come to the play” at our own pace, as “the text is delivered by this expert cast.”  Calling La Femme’s production an “excellent revival,” Stewart added, “Few directors can make a nearly 63-year-old play feel fresh and exciting quite the same way Pendleton can.”  He closed with this admonition: “It's the kind of theatrical magic you really have to experience firsthand.”  TheaterScene’s Darryl Reilly declared that The Traveling Lady has been “tenderly revived” with “wonderful performances and excellent staging” at the Cherry Lane Theatre.  In contrast to some of his colleagues in the critical dodge, Reilly found that the director “has inventively staged the play,” having “creatively utilized [the small space] with the actors perpetually making entrances and exits through the theater’s center aisle.”  The reviewer affirmed, “Mr. Pendleton’s keen direction injects insight, a measured pace and incites emotion, perfectly realizing Foote’s introspective vision.”  Reilly concluded his notice by acknowledging: “Though decidedly not a major play, this production is highly successful.”

Samuel L. Leiter, writing on Theater Pizzazz, characterized the play as “a bittersweet romantic piece,” but deemed the revival “a sleepy misfire.”  The production, according to Leiter, “moseys along oh so slowly” because “Foote’s plotting is minimal” and the cast “of first-class New York actors fails to find more in their roles than their obvious external features.”  The “burgeoning romance” of Slim and Georgette is predictable, which isn’t helped by the fact that “the flame between Lichty and Bull never ignites.”  Leiter finds the play “much harder than it looks” to stage, “requiring pitch-perfect casting, nuanced performances of still waters-run-deep characters; carefully calibrated timing and pacing; and expertly crafted staging.”  The TP reviewer lamented, “These qualities are just what director Austin Pendleton’s lethargic production fails to achieve.”  He found, “Rarely does the atmosphere rise to compellingly dramatic levels; rarely is there any tension; and rarely do we care what happens to any of these people.” 

Elyse Sommer declared on CurtainUp that Traveling Lady “has all the earmarks for an authentic and enjoyable trip to Foote Country” and provides “an opportunity for young theater goers to experience Horton Foote’s richly detailed portraits a long gone life styles in which deceptively uneventful lives explode.”  In a “handsomely staged and well-performed revival,” Pendleton has put together a cast that is “more than up to [the] challenge” of “dig[ging] into the rhythm of his words, and the personalities of [Foote’s] characters.”  Pendleton’s “direction . . . and the production values overall enhance and support” the play, even though the director “overdoes the use of the aisle for” entrances and exits.  On New York Theatre Guide, Kathleen Campion asserted that The Traveling Lady “has the feel of an old slipper; worn, whiffy, if endearingly reliable, and wildly predictable.”  It’s the acting, Campion reported, that’s the reason to see the Cherry Lane  production.  After individually praising each cast member, the NYTG reviewer concluded, “There’s nothing wrong with The Traveling Lady but there is little bite to it, little memorable about it, nothing surprising to take away.”  In the end, she suggested, “If you like Horton Foote, you will probably like this one.

The Huffington Post’s David Finkle dubbed the Cherry Lane’s Traveling Lady “one of those just-about-flawless revivals that Foote seems to invite,” presented “under Austin Pendleton’s reliably sympathetic and spanking-clean direction.”  With considerable praise for Foote and his dramaturgy and “his series of high-caliber works,” Finkle offered “hearty thanks” to the “strong cast” (with “a fond nod to Ziemba”). 

'A Day by the Sea'

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.  (I wrote about this impression on ROT in “Vanity, Thy Name Is Actor-Director,” posted on 22 September 2011.)  It’s exceedingly rare, I’ve found, that an overlooked gem is discovered.  (I’m thinking of Paul Osborn’s Morning’s at Seven, which was originally produced on Broadway in 1939 and then found a new audience in 1980 and ran in revival for 580 performances, winning three Tonys and five Drama Desk Awards.  A 2002 revival ran another 132 performances.)

Jonathan Bank of the Mint Theater Company, which specializes in reviving old plays, has complained that the “classic plays that are produced all the time in U.S. theaters . . . are always the same dozen or so.”  Leaving aside that Bank is speaking of “classics”—he specifies “Four Chekhovs”—not merely “oldies” (golden or otherwise), I dispute that there are only a “dozen or so.”  To begin with, there are five full-length Chekhov plays (including Ivanov) that are often staged, six if you count The Wood Demon, and a slew of popular one-acts.  Then there are the works of Barrie, Büchner, Gogol, Gorky, Ibsen, Jarry , Maeterlinck, Pinero, Rostand, Shaw, Strindberg, Wedekind, and Wilde—and that’s just the 19th century, like Chekhov, and some of the better-known writers.  Come forward into the 20th century, even just up to the ’50s, and there are scores of standards and modern classics that are popular with both theaters and audiences.  (Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page from 1928 is about to get a limited Broadway run; 1939’s The Little Foxes by Lillian Hellman is coming to the Manhattan Theatre Club in the spring.)  So, from my perspective, Bank is wrong to start with.  He’s deliberately understating the truth for the sake of argument.  What I suspect he really means is that the old plays that are commonly produced on American stages aren’t the obscure, forgotten scripts he likes.  As to that, I refer everyone back to my opening assertion.

None of this means I don’t like old plays, because I do.  I have criteria that are apparently higher than Bank’s, however.  So when Diana, my frequent theater companion, suggested we catch the Mint’s revival of N. C. Hunter’s A Day by the Sea (1953) at the end of last month, I had my doubts because of my past experiences with the troupe.  The choice was Diana’s, however, and I deferred to her inclination.  (Neil Genzlinger’s rave review appeared in the New York Times the day before Diana and I saw Day, and that also made me belay my instincts.)  It turns out that my intuition, if not my decision, was right.  I also found that the ability I often have to discern whether a show will be good or bad from a publicity blurb—or, when I was acting, a casting notice—is still intact.

The Mint Theater Company, founded in 1992, declares in its programs and on its  website that its mission is to find and produce “worthwhile plays from the past that have been lost or forgotten.”  Bank, the company’s current artistic director, took over in 1995 and since then, its publicity states, the Mint’s presented “close to 50 neglected plays . . . that might otherwise have been lost forever.”  New York Times theater reviewer Ben Brantley dubbed the company “resurrectionist extraordinaire of forgotten plays” five years ago.  The troupe’s reach has gone back as far as 1852 (George Aikins’s adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1997) and 1886 (Leo Tolstoy’s The Power of Darkness, 2007) and as recent as 1957 (J. B. Priestley’s The Glass Cage, 2008).  The Mint’s efforts have been rewarded with not only a string of good reviews, but also an Obie Grant (2001), a special Drama Desk Award (2002), and the New York Theatre Museum’s Theatre Preservation Award (2010), as well as several Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel Award nominations. 

Though the Mint is happy just to “scour the dramaturgical dustbin for worthwhile plays from the past,” the company’s especially pleased when it introduces a writer in a new light.  A. A. Milne was best known as a children’s author, especially on the strength of his Winnie-the-Pooh books, but the Mint presented his Mr. Pim Passes By (1921) in 1997-98 and again in 2004 (in rep with 1922’s The Truth About Blayds); D. H. Lawrence was only seen as a novelist until the Mint staged The Daughter-In-Law (1912) in 2003 and The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (1911) in 2009; Ernest Hemingway wrote only one play, the forgotten Fifth Column (1938), which the troupe produced in 2008.  But the company’s proudest achievement is arguably its focus on women dramatists, who “have always been neglected,” points out artistic director Bank, “and women playwrights fifty or sixty years ago wrote some fine drama.”  Over half of the Mint’s productions have been by women playwrights (Zona Gale, Githa Sowerby, Rachel Crothers, Teresa Deevy, among many others); its show just prior to A Day by the Sea was the U.S. première of Hazel Ellis’s Women Without Men (1938) last January through March.

The Mint started in 1992 as an actor-training program.  When Bank become the company’s executive director, he shifted its focus to production.  The Mint began staging historical plays in 1997 with Uncle Tom’s Cabin and now produces three to four old scripts a season.  Bank, who combs through play anthologies and pours over old reviews, has said, “We try to find plays, frankly, that nobody has ever heard of.  People can come here, taking a bit of a gamble.”  And the Mint not only produces old plays, they publish them as well, in a series of Reclaimed collections (now up to five) edited by Bank and distributed free to libraries, theaters, and schools.  The Mint also hosts symposiums about the plays featuring authorities in fields related to the texts or their milieux. 

Beside being a history buff, Bank has a penchant for narratives.  His interest is primarily in “a well-written play with a good story,” he says; indeed, the company’s motto used to be: “Good stories well told.”  Bank compares today’s playwrights with those of yore and finds that past writers “were better storytellers. . . .  I think too many playwrights today think they are writing movie scripts for the theater.  There is a big difference.”  In preparing scripts for production at Mint, the company may trim some excess dialogue that Bank doesn’t think will resonate with today’s audiences, but they never rewrite or adapt the plays. 

N[orman] C[harles] Hunter was born in 1908 in Derbyshire, England, and died in 1971 in London.  He intended to follow his father, a decorated army lieutenant colonel, into a military career and even attended the Royal Military College in Sandhurst, Berkshire.  Commissioned in the Dragoon Guards in 1930, he resigned three years later to become a writer.  (To support himself, Hunter took a job on the staff of the British Broadcasting Corporation.)  Before World War II, Hunter wrote six plays and four novels, although, despite showing great promise, success in either genre eluded him.  All of Hunter’s early plays are comedies with elements of farce, but as his dramaturgy matured, his writing would develop poignancy and poetry. 

The nascent dramatist served in the Royal Artillery during World War II and spent some time convalescing in a Devon military hospital during the war.  In 1947, Hunter returned to writing plays.  His scripts showed a marked change, however, perhaps as a result of Hunter’s wartime experience.  More despairing and realistic, Waters of the Moon in 1951 and A Day by the Sea in 1953 provided Hunter with a reputation as an “English Chekhov.”  (Of course, Hunter wasn’t the only playwright of his era to be given that sobriquet.  Rodney Ackland—The Dark River, 1943—and Wynyard Browne—The Holly and the Ivy, 1950—were others, though, like Hunter, mostly forgotten today.)  In his review of the Broadway production of A Day by the Sea, Brooks Atkinson, calling the characterization “a synonym for preciousness and languor,” wrote in the New York Times: “To call a playwright ‘Chekhovian’ today is to utter opprobrium and to consign him to the doghouse.”  

Time, unfortunately, wasn’t kind to Hunter and his plays fell out of fashion with the arrival of a new breed of writers composing dramas concerning the working classes such as John Osborne (Look Back in Anger, 1956) and the Angry Young Men in the ’50s and then Joe Orton (What the Butler Saw, 1969) and Shelagh Delaney (A Taste of Honey, 1959) in the ’60s.  Hunter wrote four plays in the decade preceding his death at 62 in 1971 (The Tulip Tree, 1962; The Excursion, 1964; Henry of Navarre, 1966; The Adventures of Tom Random, 1967) but compared to the new revolutionary writers whose work dealt with topics and used language far from the drawing-room dramas of N. C. Hunter, these looked quaint and old-fashioned.  

Nonetheless, in their time, Hunter’s plays attracted such notable actors to perform them as John Gielgud (A Day by the Sea), Wendy Hiller (Waters of the Moon, 1975 revival), Sybil Thorndike (Waters of the Moon, 1951; A Day by the Sea), Ralph Richardson (A Day by the Sea), Vanessa Redgrave (A Touch of the Sun, 1958), Michael Redgrave (A Touch of the Sun), and Ingrid Bergman (Waters of the Moon, 1975).  TV films were adapted from several of his plays in the U.K.  The Actors Company Theatre (TACT) presented the New York première of Waters of the Moon in its minimally staged Salon Series in 2009.  Hunter’s 1951 play A Picture of Autumn (which received only a one-night staging in London) was revived Off-Broadway by the Mint Theater Company in 2013 (with a cast that included George Morfogen, Jill Turner, and Katie Firth of the current production). 

A Day by the Sea opened on London’s West End in 1953 and ran for 386 performances in a production that starred Sir John Gielgud (who also directed, as Julian), Dame Sybil Thorndike (Laura), Irene Worth (Frances), and Sir Ralph Richardson (Doctor Farley).  Directed in New York by Sir Cedric Hardwicke, the play opened at the ANTA Playhouse (now the August Wilson Theatre) on Broadway on 26 September 1955 with Jessica Tandy as Frances and Hume Cronyn as Julian and ran only 24 performances until 15 October.  The Mint Theater’s Off-Broadway presentation of A Day by the Sea, the only Hunter play to run on Broadway, is the first New York revival of the 1953 play.  It began previews at the Samuel Beckett Theatre on Theatre Row on 22 July and opened on 25 August; the production’s scheduled closing has been extended to 23 October from 24 September.  (Day, Mint’s inaugural show for the season, is the company’s début production in the Beckett, its new home.)  Diana and I met at the Theatre Row complex on West 42nd Street to see the 7:30 performance on Saturday evening, 27 August. 

Directed for the Mint by Austin Pendleton, the two-intermission Day by the Sea runs two hours and 50 minutes.  The story takes place over 24 hours in May 1953 at the Dorset estate of Laura Anson (Jill Tanner), a 65-year-old widow, on the English Channel 120 miles southwest of London.  Laura is occasionally visited at her home, with its quiet garden terrace by a river and a private beach where the family picnics and strolls by the sea, by her 40-year-old son, Julian (Julian Elfer), a mid-level British diplomat posted to Paris.  Also living with her is her octogenarian brother-in-law David (George Morfogen), who shifts between his memories and the present, and an attendant physician, the alcoholic, embittered Doctor Farley (Philip Goodwin).  It’s an idyllic and privileged location, undisturbed by the outside world which doesn’t seem to dare intrude aside from the daily newspaper and the “wireless radio.”  (Television, which 21% of Britons had by 1953, isn’t even mentioned.  My guess: the Ansons don’t have a set.)

Also returning for a visit this summer is Frances Farrar (Katie Firth), an orphan who was raised by the Ansons and, after a 20-year absence, is seeking refuge after leaving her suicidal second husband, with her daughter, Elinor (Kylie McVey), and son, Toby (Athan Sporek), along with their governess, 35-year-old spinster Matty Mathieson (Polly McKie).  The family solicitor, William Gregson (Curzon Dobell), pays a call during the course of the play, and Julian’s superior in the Foreign Office, Humphrey Caldwell (Sean Gormley), makes an appearance bearing portentous news.

Hunter has given each character an opportunity to take the stage and reveal her or his story, but in act two, the main focus becomes Julian’s situation.  The play is essentially about his personal and professional mid-life crises (an expression I don’t think was current in the 1950s).  His foreign service  career has been middling as younger officers have been promoted ahead of him and Caldwell has come to inform him that he’s being recalled from Paris—principally because he’s not well liked at the embassy, where he’s seen as a humorless workaholic—and he sees that his life of lost opportunities and missed chances has been wasted and unappreciated.

Julian’s biggest failure, which he’d never even recognized until now, is the possibility of marriage to Frances, who’d been in love with him since their shared childhoods.  They went their separate ways two decades ago, but Julian suddenly imagines that he can reignite Frances’s interest.  It’s too late, of course, and the same fate befalls the desperately lonely Miss Mathieson, who makes a proposal to the doctor.  Beyond contemplating Julian’s unfulfilled life, Day is about words unspoken, dreams unattained, feelings unexpressed, and hope unrealized.  The play ends on a note of despondency as no one gets even a glimmer of change for the better.

A Day by the Sea is the third Mint production I’ve seen, but the previous ones (a two-play bill of George Kelly’s The Flattering Word, 1929, and Harley Granville-Barker’s A Farewell to Theater, 1920, and Arthur Schnitzler’s 1911 Far and Wide) were as far back as 2000 and 2003.  I stopped going to the Mint because I had a recurring problem with its repertoire: I questioned the need to revive the old plays they staged.  I’m afraid I had the same problem with Day that I had with the earlier Mint shows.  It doesn’t have much to say to us in the 21st century.  Hunter’s study of “the strains and stresses of middle-age” isn’t a particularly new or under-explored topic, and it’s not terribly dramatic.  Day is all talk—for nearly three hours (one character even dares to ask, “Does something happen soon?  It’s pretty dull, this”)—and the situation and characters are so contrived that what little drama there is, is phony anyway.  (Even the acting, which I’ll get to in more detail shortly, is artificial and I suspect that the play, which isn’t a “style” piece, drove the actors into that mode somehow.)

(Diana, by the way, liked Day.  She seems to like talk plays; I had the same difference of opinion with her over Oslo in July and some years ago over David Ives’s New Jerusalem.  See my reports on, respectively, 13 August 2016 and 20 April 2014.) 

As far as I’m concerned, it’s perfectly understandable that Hunter fell quickly out of fashion as soon as Osborne and the Angry Young Men came on the scene three years after Day went on stage—and why, despite Timesman Genzlinger’s mystification, it ran only 24 performances in New York in 1955.  Furthermore, I see no damn good reason to give him a second life except as a museum curiosity. 

In its statement of the Mint’s mission, the company’s webpage posts: ”We do more than blow the dust off neglected plays; we make vital connections between the past and present.”  It’s an important point  for the troupe, and in a profile of the Mint and Jonathan Bank, the author repeats that the theater is “famous for presenting plays from the recesses of history . . . that connect to the modern world.”  As I said earlier, I don’t see it, especially not in A Day by the Sea.  Oh, yes, there are almost always some parallels and connections between period plays and today—and 1953 wasn’t all that long ago, really.  But central links, substantive associations?  No.  Universal truths about the human condition?  Nothing beyond the banal.

(A personal sidelight: In 1977, I saw Cronyn and Tandy in D. L. Coburn’s The Gin Game, another play in which there’s no real action.  Not only did the acting couple make the play eminently watchable, despite its inactivity, but they kept it running.  Gin Game stayed at the John Golden Theatre for 528 performances, but E. G. Marshall took ove for Cronyn in June 1978 and Maureen Stapleton replaced Tandy around September—and the show closed on 31 December.  Revivals in 1997 and 2025 ran respectively 164 and 115 performances, suggesting to me that the Cronyns were the reason Gin Game did so well at the box office.  Yet they couldn’t manage the same result for A Day by the Sea in 1955.  I posit that even though the Cronyns were already a renowned acting couple, the play was impervious to their appeal.)

The Anson estate is hermetically sealed against the outside world.  Julian makes gestures of involvement in the world of affairs—he carries a newspaper with him everywhere, but hardly actually reads it—but this stance is mostly used as a way to berate Laura for being uninterested in anything beyond the borders of the family estate to which she’s devoted.  In the Ansons’ version of Dorset, momentous events like the 1952 death of King George VI and the succession of Princess Elizabeth to the throne don’t seem to have happened.  Beyond Britain, the United States got a new president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had been the supreme commander of the Allied forces in the recent war; Joseph Stalin died in the Soviet Union, which got a new premier; Dag Hammarskjöld became the second United Nations secretary-general; the discovery of DNA was announced; Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the top of Mt. Everest—all before the end of May 1953.  None of it penetrated the time warp of Hunter’s artificial, denatured world.

(By the way, also never raised is the circumstance of Frances’s divorce from her second husband.  My understanding of British divorce laws in the ’50s is that there was only one admissible grounds: infidelity.  Either Frances or her husband had to have committed adultery in order for a divorce to be granted in England at the time.  Now, I’ve heard of couples seeking a legal divorce deliberately setting up a case for infidelity, but in A Day by the Sea, nothing at all is mentioned.  Perhaps this was in the bits Bank and Pendleton cut from the text as irrelevant, but a 1950s London audience would surely have known the requirements.)

This disconnect is part of what impels me to dismiss A Day by the Sea as a viable piece of theater.  Julian is built up as engaged in the global issues of the time, rattling off a few matters his mother doesn’t even acknowledge.  But it’s an imitation of a what we’d call today a “foreign policy wonk”; not only has the accession to the throne of England’s first queen in over a generation not mentioned, but the Cold War doesn’t even get a nod.  That’s just the macrocosm—the big picture.  At the individual character level the play’s no more real.  As I said, Julian’s portrayed as someone concerned with affairs of state, but he does no more than give them lip service.  It’s a construct, not a reality, and all the other characters cleave to the same pattern.  Hunter has limned a set of characteristics for each one—Frances is lost and confused, Laura is devoted to the estate, Doctor Finley is embittered and depressed, Miss Mathieson is lonely and desperate—and the actors toe the line like puppets.  But there’s no humanity in it; it’s all pro forma, not an organic feeling in the lot. 

On top of that, Hunter’s set up each character’s personality and circumstances so that, like a little jigsaw puzzle, all the pieces fit perfectly into the schematic plot.  (Giving each character a moment to shine, however, attenuates the play without always advancing its point.  Each one explaining him- or herself at length and in detail is an anti-Chekhovian technique, spelling out what the great Russian writer made us piece together.  One’s storytelling, the other’s drama.)  Julian’s and Matty’s proposals fail because they have to, not because the characters do.  In fact, they have to make the proposals because the story demands it—Hunter’s seen to that.  Julian’s a workaholic because if he’s not, he can’t be the failure Hunter needs him to be so he can have that career and personal crisis.  Of course, like any good artificial life form, the characters of A Day by the Sea don’t change even after they have their crises; they all go right back to the way they were before the play started, a little worse off for the experience but unchanged fundamentally.  It’s a virtual drama.

I don’t know if Bank or Pendleton acknowledge this—I suspect not—but set designer Charles Morgan might have.  His scenic design suggests he recognized the artificial nature of the play.  First, the opening set, which we see when we take our seats since there’s no front drape, is a little too perfect, like a computer-generated 3-D picture.  (What it reminded me of more than anything is a scene in one of those View-Master slides we used to look at when we were kids.  It looked real, but somehow not quite.)  While the principal scenery—the garden terrace and its concrete wall and planted flower urns, the swing, the patio chairs and table, the wood-framed lounge chair—are all realistic in style, the periphery of trees and foliage isn’t; it’s slightly impressionistic, vague, fuzzy.  Again, not real.

But the first of two give-aways is that on the back wall of the stage isn’t a cyc or a painted backdrop of a receding vista, but a huge, framed painting showing the view of the hills and the river of the nearby countryside.  The painting style was sort of Hudson River School Romanticism (or whatever the British counterpart would have been).  The idealized and romanticized view of the landscape depicted by that art movement is a perfect evocation of the timbre of Hunter’s play.  (In the beach setting of act two, the river painting is switched for one showing a seashore.)  

The second manifestation of this sense of unreality I attribute to Morgan is strikingly unrealistic: the gold-and-ivory frame that demarcates the background painting is repeated around the proscenium opening and then again, halfway back over the center of the playing area above the terrace.  Together, this device calls to mind those infinitely recursive pictures sometimes seen in product packaging.  (I’ve learned that this is called the Droste effect: a picture appearing within itself, the smaller version containing an even smaller version of the picture, and so on, ad infinitum.)  It signifies to me that this is a world that folds in on itself endlessly.  Furthermore, since there’s a second “proscenium arch” within the set, it signifies to me that not only are the actors playing roles, but the characters are also playing parts.

Aside from this scenic interpretation, Morgan’s design seems to have created a directorial dilemma for Pendleton, which he wasn’t able to solve.  It looked like there’s too much distance between the off-stage edges of the set and the main playing areas downstage, where almost all the activity happens.  (Both the terrace furniture and the beach paraphernalia are down front.)  Actors entering during on-going scenes have to come onto the stage several feet, then stand for a minute or two awaiting their cues before speaking and completing their entrances.  It looks as if they’re eavesdropping, but they aren’t; they’re just waiting, and it looks very awkward and telegraphs that a new scene’s about to start.

No other design element makes this statement.  Martha Hally’s costumes are perfectly reflective of the times and class presented by the play.  Aside from lawyer Gregson and Julian, the other summer inhabitants of the Anson estate wear seasonal country or beach attire compatible with the time (the early ’50s) and place (the U.K.—let’s face it, they’re just more formal than we are here in the colonies).  Julian and Gregson, though, never appear without a dark suit; the lawyer’s on the job, so that’s understandable, but Julian probably doesn’t own even the light grey version that his Whitehall superior, Humphrey Caldwell, wears when he pays his visit.  The music of Jane Shaw and the background sounds she employs blend in the same way. 

The performances vary slightly.  I found all of the acting brittle and forced, less than natural, and I attribute that to the nature of Hunter’s script and the inherent requirements of Day: its time, place, and class.  I’ll assume that actors of the quality of this cast don’t have problems putting themselves back in time to the mid-20th century.  Next to learning lines, if they can’t do that, they’re in the wrong business.  But perhaps the upper-middle-class British milieu of Hunter’s world throws them a bit, maybe with the addition of a plummy accent as well.  (Miss Mathieson is a Scot, so Polly McKie has a different task.)  Whatever it is that makes everyone on stage take such care with their speech and behavior, it comes off as if they’re all thinking their way through every moment and each word.  That’s for rehearsal, not performance; by then, an actor should have internalized all that care and effort and I shouldn’t be seeing and hearing it.  Given how I feel about this play, I posit that the actors all sense the artificiality of the script and just can’t commit to it on a visceral level.  Just a guess, of course, but that’s my sense of what’s going on on stage.

Several of the actors, however, seem to go a step further.  As I said earlier, Day isn’t a style show: the acting is supposed to be naturalistic; but some of the cast come very close to doing style, a kind of Restoration drama-manqué.  The clearest example is Julian Elfer as Julian Anson.  (In his black suit and inability to unbend, Elfer reminded me repeatedly of English actor Ben Miller as Detective Inspector Richard Poole on the British police procedural Death in Paradise, the ultimate fish out of water.  Detailed from London to the Caribbean island of St. Marie, Poole also insists on wearing a dark suit at all times.  It doesn’t hurt this resemblance that Elfer, who’s British-born, sounds remarkably like Miller’s uptight DI Poole.)  Also suffering from this excessive artificiality is Katie Firth as Frances.  It’s less pronounced than in Elfer’s performance, but Firth, too, seems always to be on guard.  That’s not Frances being wary, but the actress treading carefully.  As artificial as I found the play on its own, the performance problems I identified added another level of unreality to the production.

Other, more fundamental problems are contingent on the acting and the directing, however.  First, though Ben Miller’s DI Poole was intended as slightly comic and eventually became endearing, Elfer’s Julian isn’t funny and never becomes a figure of sympathy.  He’s a prig with a stick up his butt and doesn’t deserve any better than he gets.  As the focal character in the play, that doesn’t bode well for the whole enterprise.  As for Laura, Tanner and Pendleton never make it clear if she’s somehow responsible for raising her son to be an ineffectual twit or if she did her best but Julian turned out the way he did despite her.  As solid as Tanner’s performance is, Laura’s little more than a catalyst for the plot: if it weren’t for her and her seaside home, the other characters wouldn’t have come together for the play.

Obviously, Pendleton is responsible for these developments, but did he select them, guide the actors to this behavior?  If he did, I can’t see any rationale for it, not artistically or dramatically at any rate.  But if the director didn’t point the actors to these performances, then why didn’t he pull them back from it or ease them out of it?  After all, that’s part of what a director is there to do—serve as the outside eye, the audience’s surrogate before the paying spectators arrive.  To be the performance editor, paring away what doesn’t belong, to shape the production the way a book editor helps the author shape her novel.  So, either Pendleton chose this manner of acting for Day, or he allowed it to remain by default.  As far as I’m concerned, he didn’t serve the play well, either way.  I doubt anything a director could have done would have made A Day by the Sea more than a middling piece of theater, a cultural-history curiosity, but the performance style of the Mint’s production only exacerbates the deficiencies I perceived.  At three hours, even small problems are magnified.

One final note on the actors: George Morfogen as Uncle David received the warmest notices, and the actor does a terrific job embodying the doddering dear old man—but poor David serves almost no purpose except as a repository for the audience’s excess sympathy and fondness.  Along with Miss Mathieson, David’s easily one of the only two truly appealing characters in the play, but what’s he actually there for?  (I might ask the same question about Elinor and Toby Eddison, Frances’s young children.  Like David, their presence adds nothing to the play.  They’re set dressing.)  Morfogen’s excellent performance is just wasted.

Based on a tally of 22 reviews, Show-Score reported that the Mint’s A Day by the Sea received 63% positive reviews, 14% negative, and 23% mixed.  The production accumulated an average rating of 77, in the positive range but moderately low from my observation of the site.  (What’s more, though Day had several 90’s and 95’s and one 100, it also got several of the lowest-scored negative notices I’ve seen so far.)

The high score went to Terry Teachout’s Wall Street Journal review, in which he lauded the company’s “refreshing originality of taste.”  Declaring that the Mint “has outdone itself” with A Day by the Sea, “the finest of the noteworthy plays” the company’s produced, Teachout pronounced the play “that rarest of rarities, a forgotten masterpiece, acted by the best ensemble cast I’ve seen in recent seasons and staged with taut vitality.”  He labeled Day “a quiet character study written in the manner of Anton Chekhov” that’s “trivial only if you think the lives of ordinary middle-class people are trivial.”  Continued Teachout, “Those are the same people about whom Chekhov wrote, and Hunter cared no less for them, portraying their sorrows with a sensitivity—and wit—that are worthy of his master.”  (The WSJ reviewer held British critic Kenneth Tynan, who, Teachout asserted, “favored the Angry Young Men of the British stage and had little use for plays without a political message,” responsible for Hunter’s demise as a successful playwright.)  Singling out Firth and Elfer for special notice, the Jounalist reported that the cast all “give vividly drawn performances” and that Pendleton “knows that the trick to making a play like ‘A Day by the Sea’ work is to winkle out the laughs and let the pathos take care of itself.”  Teachout added that “everything about this staging is as right as the play itself,” noting that the “sets are uncomplicated but utterly right” and the sound design “set just the right mood.”  The Journal review-writer concluded, “Would that Broadway were still a fitting home for plays like ‘A Day by the Sea.’ Like everything the Mint does, it deserves a much wider audience.”

The lowest score in Show-Score’s tally (30) went to north-central Connecticut’s Journal-Inquirer in which Lauren Yarger quips in her opening paragraphs that in Day, the members of a family “gaze out expectantly on the horizon waiting for something to ride in on the tide.”  But “they are disappointed—and so is the audience—because very little happens in the three-hour-with-two-intermissions production.”  In contrast with previous, more successful Mint revivals, Day “has us wondering how this play ever got produced in the first pla[ce], let alone beat out others more deserving of a revival.”  Pendleton’s Day, wrote Yarger, “features good actors, but the slim plot, sketchy character development, and exposition-laden dialogue don’t give them much to work with, unfortunately.”  Yarger also saw a similar meaning in the scenic devices in Morgan’s design to what I described earlier, the “blurry leaves hanging overhead and large impressionistic paintings”: “The blurry art is indicative of the characters[’] efforts to bring a sharper focus to the meaning of their lives.”  The reviewer lamented, however, “Not much happens in the way of developing any of [the] plots, however, despite moments of hope for insightful thought.”  Suggesting that “most of Act One could be cut,” she went on to present a list of dramatic deficiencies inherent in Day and the Mint production, including “so laced with explanations of past events to give us background,” “characters sing for reasons that escape me,” and “awkward entrances by the actors throughout” as “actors seems to be walking onto stage, distracting attention, just so they can get to their marks for upcoming lines.” 

In the New York Times, which got a 90 rating from Show-Score, Neil Genzlinger opened his review by declaring, “There’s so much to like about the Mint Theater Company’s revisiting of ‘A Day by the Sea’ that it’s hard to know what to single out for first-paragraph attention.”  The Timesman called A Day by the Sea a “very well made play” about “an economically comfortable family in an anxious age,” and he asserted that director Pendleton “gets the most out of it.”  (Where the Journal’s Teachout wondered “how Hunter . . . could have dropped off the map of English-language theater,” Genzlinger marveled, “How the 1955 Broadway production of this play ran only a few weeks, despite Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy in the roles, is a mystery.”  I believe I’ve made my take on both questions clear.)

Michael Feingold opened his Village Voice notice by recounting one moment: “‘How much longer are we going to sit here?’ grouses an elderly uncle to the country-house clan gathered for a seaside picnic.”  Feingold added, “Many in the 2016 audiences . . . may share his irritation” (and even suggested that this might have explained the short run of the Cronyn-Tandy Broadway mounting). He provided a list of things that don’t happen (Julian doesn’t get promoted and doesn’t marry Frances, Doctor Finley doesn’t get sober or lose his job, and so on) “while Hunter’s inaction winds through its three languid hours, with two intermissions.”  Feingold had mixed feelings about Hunter’s “rhetorical expansiveness,” those long speeches his characters give.  On the one hand, he said, “his characters sometimes rise to quite vivid oratorical passages”; on the other, the “grand speeches . . . make the characters seem like empty allegorical figures, while the touches of quirky individuality turn the rhetoric hollow.”  This dichotomy, averred the Voice reviewer, “gives his plays their peculiarly cloggy quality, heightening the work’s oddity while diluting its intensity.”  As for Hunter’s dramaturgical fate, Feingold observed, “Times had changed; in due course England’s . . . theater changed with them.  Hunter’s playwriting, poised on the cusp of change, did not.”  The “Goings On About Town” column in the New Yorker called Day a “leisurely play” in a “glowing revival” which “does great honor” to the “legendary” London cast of 1953.  “Hunter’s lyrical dialogue,” wrote the New Yorker reviewer, “concerns matters practical and philosophical.”

Time Out New York’s David Cote remarked that Hunter “wears” his Chekhovian influence “slavishly,” and with some of the more obvious echoes of the master playwright, “you’re just begging for unflattering comparisons with the Russian master.”  Complaining of Hunter’s “derivativeness,” the man from TONY quipped that “it’s as if Hunter wrote on tracing paper laid over Uncle Vanya.”  Still, Cote noted, the playwright “is a sensitive observer of English neuroses and resilience” and the “fine cast . . . navigates the quippy, stiff-upper-lipness with vibrant grace.”  The play’s “a melancholy study of middle-age malaise leavened by flashes of wit and humor, good for the Anglophiles and Downton Abbey addicts,” Cote concluded, “even if this tidy revival doesn’t wash the previous criticism away with the tide.”

On Theater Pizzazz, Sandi Durell reported that, despite a ”talented cast” “wisely” directed by Pendleton, A Day by the Sea is “an all too lengthy and tedious 2 hours 55 minutes!”  Nonetheless, the play “does have its many moments of humor and heartfelt sincerity.”  “While the feelings presented in this play are universal,” wrote David Gordon on TheaterMania, “they're strained by the three-act structure, with too little action to justify its length.”  “A Day by the Sea is surprisingly relevant,” noted Gordon, but the “attractive” production, which “moves at a leisurely pace,” “cannot overcome the tediousness of the script.”  Before “any semblance of action occurs,” much of the three-hour performance must pass, and the “enigmatic quality of the moods on display doesn't help.”  The production is “pleasing to look at,” with “breezily picturesque” scenery, “lovely period costumes,” and “authentic seaside lighting.”  With the exception of a few—Gordon named George Morfogen and McKie—“most of the company is too actorly to be truly believable.” 

Samuel L. Leiter warned, “Very little happens” in A Day by the Sea on Theatre’s Leiter Side: “Lengthy monologues expressing cynicism about the state of the world as well as idealistic visions of the future mingle with casual, throwaway trivialities.  After nearly three hours, the play concludes with a tone of bittersweet regret for lost opportunities and the somewhat forced sense that a new and better phase in the lives of all concerned is about to begin.”  But Leiter lamented, “The best one can say of the revival (and of the play itself, for that matter) . . . is that it’s dully respectable.”  The blogger specified:

The staging is uninspired, the casting flawed, and the acting uneven; moreover, the slow-paced, relatively plotless play, although not entirely lifeless nor without moments of dry humor, suffers too many longueurs.  And Hunter’s writing in act one offers a lesson in how not to introduce exposition.

The set, however, is “pretty,” reported Leiter, and “there are generally effective performances from the venerable George Morfogen, . . . Jill Tanner . . ., and Polly McKie.” 

On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer described the Mint’s Day as a “handsomely staged, splendidly performed production” that “proves that old-fashioned, well-made plays of the 1950s can still entertain and overcome their dated aspects.”  She also reported that it’s “three-acts in which nothing much happens except for a lot of exposition,” yet Sommer labels Day “distinguished.”  The CU reviewer further noted, “It’s a talky play, but for the most part talky in the best sense.”  That talk, Sommer explained, is the play’s chief asset, for though “we can pretty accurately guess what’s going to happen just ten or fifteen minutes into the play,” Hunter “makes it all fresh and, yes, timely” by “a series of revealing and acutely observed conversations.”  Pendleton keeps the traffic flowing “smoothly so that the actors can make the most of their well-developed characters and the witty interchanges.” 

Michael Portantiere complained on Talkin’ Broadway, “The play’s length and its three-act structure seem ill advised, and at least one of the 10 characters seems entirely superfluous.”  (He meant solicitor Gregson, as he later explained.)  He also observed that there are “rather too many” subplots and characters and that those plots and the “interrelationships between the characters are interesting in themselves, but they are not woven together very well by the playwright,” especially under the “flaccid direction” of Austin Pendleton.  The director, Portantiere asserted, “seems to have concentrated more on blocking and stage business than helping the cast connect with the text and with each other.”  Despite these flaws, the TB reviewer found, however, that “the Mint has given A Day by the Sea a typically gorgeous, thoroughly professional production,” with sets and costumes that “couldn’t be lovelier” or lighting “any closer to perfect.” 

In the Huffington Post, David Finkle quoted the theater critic W. A. Darlington of London’s Daily Telegraph on A Day by the Sea in 1953, who thought other critics were “demonstrably wrong” when they “treated disparagingly” the work of N. C. Hunter, whose “sense of character was acute and full of original observation”—and Finkle affirmed, “I won't attempt to put it any better.”  The HP First Nighter asserted, “A Day by the Sea practically runs down a checklist of Chekhovian aspects,” and names several of them, adding, “This is Chekhov territory, all right.”  All the actors (including, Finkle reported, the choldren) “bring infinite subtleties to their assignments” as they perform on Morgan’s “unusually elegant set” in Hally's “flawless period costumes.”  Director Pendleton “is attuned to Hunter's Chekhovian blend of disillusionment, humor and eventual acceptance and . . . brings it all to vibrant, plangent life.” 

[A completely irrelevant comment: There are two children in A Day by the Sea.  Though Hunter seems to have made a point of pinpointing the ages of nearly all his characters, he didn’t specify how old Frances’s daughter and son are, but we do know that they were born during World War II and that they were too young to really know their father, Frances’s first husband, when he was killed in combat.  Remembering that the war in Europe began in 1939, Elinor and Toby Eddison could be as old as 14 and, say, 9—but I imagine they’re about the same ages as the actors who play them at the Mint.  Kylie McVey, who plays Elinor, says she’s about to start eighth grade, which I figure makes her about 13; brother Toby is played by Athan Sporek, who says he’s 8.  During the show, I calculated how old I’d have been in May 1953.  I’d have turned 7 on my next birthday—close to the age of little Toby in the play.  Obviously we’re separated by nationality and, to a large extent, class, but in the broadest sense, I’d have been Toby.  Laura Anson isn’t the children’s grandmother by blood, but they consider her as such; my mother’s  parents didn’t have an estate, but every summer they used to take a house in Deal, New Jersey, a town on the Jersey Shore, and I vaguely remember spending time there with my mom and dad.  (There are lots of photos of me at the Deal house.  One shows my mother’s grandfather, her mother, my mother, and me sitting in a diagonal line down the steps of the house’s front veranda—four generations in chronological order.)  Toby’s and my lives were certainly nowhere near alike, but in the world of Hunter’s play, the character who most closely represents me is Toby.

[As I said: completely irrelevant.  I’m just sayin’.]