Kevin O’Donnell, Anna Chlumsky, Catherine Curtin and Kristen Johnston (in front)
(Photo credit: Richard Termine)
If Maurine Dallas Watkins’ backstage theater farce, So Help Me God!, had opened in 1929 as it was scheduled to do, it would probably be as famous today as Hecht and MacArthur’s The Front Page or Twentieth Century which it resembles and predates by three years. As Broadway star Lily Darnley, tall statuesque Kristen Johnston runs the gamut of – everything: moods, voice, facial expressions – and demonstrates what is meant by a diva. While rehearsing the fictional Empty Hands set to open out of town in two weeks, she not only eats the scenery, she devours everyone and everything that gets in her way. Like Lily, Johnston is a star and it is women like them that get their way because they bring in the box office.
Along the way, Watkins (best known as the author of the original stage play, Chicago) has some insider truths to say about theater folk and it probably has not changed much in 80 years. Jonathan Bank directing the Mint Theater world premiere at the Lucille Lortel wisely stays out of the actors’ way and lets the mayhem and bedlam ensue. Visually the play is faithful to its 1929 setting with beautiful period gowns by Clint Ramos and an art-deco hotel interior by Bill Clarke. The actual plot suggests All About Eve which it predates by two decades. So Help Me God! shows stardom as a cut-throat business and theater as a playground for prima donnas. It is probably an allegory of many professions.
Kerren-Heppuch Lane (played by Anna Chlumsky), fresh off the bus from Cincinnati, turns up at the Regent Theater on New York’s 46th Street hoping to meet her idol Lily Darnley (Johnston) who is supposed to be rehearsing the new drama, Empty Hands. However, the star of drawing room comedy, desiring to make her debut in serious theater, is keeping the cast and crew waiting. When Darnley arrives, hours late, she demands changes in the script, her character, her costumes and the cast, and gets them. No one can say no to her. “I’m the STAR and can do whatever I like,” Darnley declares.
With Darnley’s firing of the ingénue (for having the wrong color hair), the newly christened Kerry gets her chance at a minor role and as Lily’s understudy, but little does she know what kind of roller coaster ride she is in for. In demanding Kerry be hired, Darnley explains to her latest director, “She has no experience, but what does that matter? She has no training. But what does that matter? She has no talent, but what does THAT matter?” Kerry gets an education in how to survive among the sharks in the theater and the audience gets an evening of hilarity. When the show finally opens in New York in the third act, it is a totally rewritten play from the one that its college professor author originally penned. The high jinks backstage go on until the final curtain of both the play and the play-within-the-play.
Johnston inhabits Lily Darnley as though she were born to play her. Her split-second shifts of mood and tone are dazzling as she goes from barracuda to forlorn innocent and back again. As the wise-cracking, coarse-talking Belle, Catherine Curtin has many of the best lines and makes the most of them. Allen Lewis Rickman only needs a cigar to be the consummate oily voiced entrepreneur as the theater producer who knows on which side his bread is buttered. The rest of the cast though satisfactory aren’t up to their level.
Chlumsky captures the naïveté of the star-stuck out-of-towner but is less successful with the sophistication she acquires after her five weeks with the professionals. Ned Noyes is pallid as the first-time playwright from academia, while Kevin O’Donnell as the juvenile star who romances both Lily and Kerry is not as suave or self-involved as he might be. Brad Bellamy as a has-been director and Kraig Swartz as the up and coming hot-shot director make an amusing contrast but neither of them registers indelible portraits. In minor roles, Matthew Waterson gets in some jabs as an arrogant English actor who is much too sure of himself, while Amy Fitts as Lily’s French maid embodies Gallic scorn. The other members of the large cast are largely recognizable types.
So Help Me God! is not as witty as Noel Coward nor as plot driven as the farces of Hecht and MacArthur or Kaufman and Hart, but its scathing portrait of a selfish star who tramples on anyone who gets in her way rings true. Kristen Johnston’s Lily Darnley is worth the price of admission as she has enormous fun showing all the facets of a truly voracious celebrity. Jonathan Bank has paced the play so that we never have time to wonder when Lily will get her come-uppance. Maurine Dallas Watkins knew theater in all its ugliness from the inside and wasn’t afraid to hold it up for slashing satire as she does in So Help Me God!
So Help Me God! (through Dec. 20)
Mint Theater at the Lucille Lortel Theater, 121 Christopher Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212-279-4200 or http://www.minttheater.org