AURIE SCHROEDER (Lulu), DAN PATRICK BRADY (Ninian)
Photo by GERRY GOODSTEIN
The same year, 1920, when women won the right to vote in the US, Zona Gale’s play, Miss Lulu Bett, opened on Broadway and played for seven months. She became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in the Drama category. The play is the story of Lulu, a spinster who exhaustingly works to cook and clean for the family of her sister, Ina. Ina’s husband, Dwight, is a clueless, overbearing oaf, not unlike the Office’s Michael Scott, minus the endearing qualities. Ina and Dwight’s children are the gratingly annoying daughter Monona and her sexually precocious older teenage sister, Diana. Other characters include the slightly-demented mother of Ina and Lulu, and the awkward but kindly music-store owner, Mr. Cornish, who first takes a shining to Diana and later to Lulu. When Dwight’s long-lost brother, Ninian, shows up and is attracted to Lulu, they playfully recite wedding vows. Dwight informs them they are actually married, since he is a justice of the peace, and off they go to a honeymoon in Savannah, leaving Dwight and Ina reeling without their unpaid servant.
A month later, Lulu reappears, explaining that Ninian might have another wife. The rest of the play revolves around the conflict between the status-obsessed Dwight, who advises his sister-in-law to let everyone think her husband abandoned her, as he fears news of bigamy will ruin his reputation, and the honest Lulu, who desperately wants everyone to know that someone did love her, at least for a short while. Gale’s original ending had Lulu refusing (at least for the moment) Cornish’s subsequent proposal, with her leaving on her own to find work and see the world through her own eyes. "Good-by. Good-by, all of you. I'm going I don't know where-to work at I don't know what. But I'm going from choice!" Because this feminist ending disturbed 1920 audiences, Gale changed it within a week so that Ninian reappears, after discovering he really is a widower and taking back Lulu.
In the WorkshopTheater Company’s production, director Kathleen Brandt wisely decides to resurrect the original ending, diverting Miss Lulu Bett as a precursor to the endless Lifetime movies now running ‘round the clock on cable. Craig M. Napoliello’s barebones set, as well as Diana Duecker’s competent lighting, mirrors the emotional austerity of the family, and Anna Gerdes’s costumes capture the period where women had recently thrown off the corset.
But the acting was more uneven. Laurie Schroeder as Lulu, Dan Patrick Brady as Ninian, and Michael Gnat as Cornish seemed like real people. Brady, especially, lit up the mostly uneventful stage when he entered, and the play lost something with his absence in Acts II and III. He’s the only one that seems to really see Lulu, and when he says, “You’re not very happy, though,” it’s one of the first truths openly expressed. No wonder Lulu falls for him. Gnat aptly captures the clumsy and emotionally-starved bachelor who can’t seem to find the right words. When he says, “What’d I say that for?” we feel his pain. Schroeder, who’s a little too attractive to seem the forgotten spinster, nonetheless makes us believe she has extremely low self-esteem. She responds to an invitation from Ninian with, “You don’t want me to go,” and “Don’t you bother about me,” and we get her hopelessness. It’s not clear whether the other actors intended to appear like time-contemporary silent film stars, with their exaggerated gestures and overdone facial expressions, or whether they were just trying to act. The characters of Dwight (David M. Mead), Ina (Anne Fizzard), and Monona (Maya Jasinska/Kate Castafieda-La Mar) never rose above caricature. Dwight’s repetitious insistence, “How women generalize,” and “The conversation at my table must not deal with domestic matters,” with Ina’s nagging to Monona, “Stop listening to older people,” only intensified the sense of stereotype. Ina herself has as much interest and allure as the faded cotton apron Lulu is never parted from in Act I, and we wonder why she was chosen as a wife over the more appealing Katherine Heigl look-alike, Lulu. And Monona, who jumps as if on a perpetual pogo stick, keeps singing, “I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves.” Which it does. It really does. Like the infernal beeping from a low-battery smoke detector. However, Diana (Mary Ruth Baggott) and Mrs. Bett (Gerrianne Raphael) had their moments of authenticity.
Miss Lulu Bett is part Cinderella, with Dwight and Ina playing the evil step-sisters, part A Doll’s House, when Lulu leaves the family, and the 1920 version of August: Osage County, in its depiction of family dysfunction. As an historical piece of naturalistic drama, the piece succeeds brilliantly, and we learn at the talk-back that this was one of the early plays that dared to show the underbelly of family life. Eugene O’Neill, a few years earlier however, was the first American playwright to introduce realism, in the tradition of Chekov, Ibsen and Strindberg. As modern entertainment, though, Miss Lulu Bett falls short. Even the abundant humor in the script isn’t enough. Awkward actors, over-explicit dialogue, and a spinster breaking free of her household duties might have enthralled audiences 90 years ago, but the world, and theater, have much changed in the intervening decades.
WorkShop Theater Company
312 W. 36th Street, 4th Floor
New York, NY
Playing through April 3
Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.
www.workshoptheater.org
(212) 352-3101