| . | 09/23/2009
Is Life Worth Living?
By: Victor Gluck
Jordan Baker and Kevin Kilner in a scene from Is Life Worth Living?
(Photo credit: Richard Termine)
Charm is a very elusive quality in the theater and very few playwrights are able to capture this. Lennox Robinson’s Is Life Worth Living? is that special play that is able to be thoroughly charming throughout. This 1933 Irish comedy which satirizes both theatrical pretensions and provincial hypocrisy has been given a loving revival by the sterling Mint Theater Company. Jonathan Bank has directed his fine cast with a light touch and the play will send you out with a smile on your face. Although playwright Lennox Robinson is hardly known in the United States today, his 1916 comedy, The Whitehaired Boy, become the most performed play at Dublin’s Abbey Theater after Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World.
Subtitled “An Exaggeration,” Is Life Worth Living? dramatizes what happens when a first-class repertory company performing “psychological and introspective” European classics by such authors as Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov and Tolstoy comes to the backwater seaside resort of Inish. Inish is a dull, ordinary, sleepy town which only comes alive three months of the year when the tourists arrive. As Hector de la Mare, its star and manager announces on his arrival, the De La Mare Repertory Company has a mission “where the pulpit is the stage and the great dramatists preach the sermons.” He is hoping to “revolutionize some person’s soul,” and expose lust, selfishness, vanity, etc., in fact, all of human frailty.
Unfortunately, the De La Mare Repertory Company does too good a job of stirring up the townspeople’s souls. This results in attempted arson, failed suicide pacts, and foiled murder, and in general, suspicions of the sins of one’s neighbors. The question on everyone’s lips becomes, “Is life worth living?” Suddenly, this once dull town is a hot-bed of rumor and in danger of landing on the front page of Ireland’s newspapers. Inish’s leading citizen John Twohig, owner of the Seaview Hotel and the Pavilion Theatre has a problem: how to return Inish to its former happy, but benighted state.
All of this is viewed from the private sitting-room of the Seaview Hotel, where the actors, the hotel managers and the leading citizens mingle. Susan Zeeman Rogers’ light airy parlor with its white furniture and blue and pink flowered wall paper sets just the right tone. Robinson’s writing is deft, the humor entertaining and the play has a great deal of wisdom in the ways of human beings.
Real life couple Kevin Kilner and Jordan Baker play acting team Hector and his wife Constance Constantia. While one might have expected flamboyant, theatrical behavior from them as high thespians, they have chosen to underplay their roles, which is probably just as well considering the outrageous behavior they inspire in all of the other characters. As the hotel owners, Paul O’Brien gives a big blustery performance as John Twohig, while Bairbre Dowling, dressed to the nines by Martha Hally, plays his wife as a vain but knowing matriarch. The love interest is credibly created in high style by Graham Outerbridge as their callow son Eddie and Leah Curney as the more sophisticated Christine Lambert, an accountant from Dublin.
The supporting characters are all colorful eccentrics and Bank has obtained delightfully memorable performances from his supporting players: Margaret Daly as Twohig’s nervous and high-strung sister, Jeremy Lawrence as the hilariously bumbling member of the Irish parliament, Erin Moon as the crisp, efficient servant with a secret of her own, John O’Creagh as the no-nonsense police officer, and John Keating as the hotel “Boots” who has ambitions to be something better.
The Mint Theater Company continues to fulfill its own mission in rediscovering and mounting excellent revivals of forgotten but worthy plays from the world repertory. This play will be particular fun for Mint regulars as at least one of the plays parodied has been revived on its stage. Is Life Worth Living? is a delightful and wise comedy of human folly. Could there be more rediscovered Lennox Robinson plays in our future?
Is Life Worth Living? (through October 18)
Mint Theater, 311 W. 43rd Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212-315-0231 or http://www.minttheater.org
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