| . | 10/14/2009
The Contrast
By: Victor Gluck
Tovah Suttle, Rob Skolits and Amanda Jones in a scene from The Contrast
(Photo credit: Ellen McKnight)
Committed “to discovering where we come from to better know who we are,” Metropolitan Playhouse has dipped all the way back to The Contrast (1787) by Royall Tyler, the first play by an American author to receive a professional production. In staging this comedy of manners in the style of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, Alex Roe has chosen to strip the play of the lavish sets and costumes that the time period would necessarily dictate. This forces the actors to rely on their style and technique and the audience to pay close attention to the language and manners of the play.
Although this puts a greater demand on the audience, the play proves to still be a viable and witty satire on pretension and phony sophistication dating from the fourth year of our nation’s history. The title is explained by Billy Dimple, the play’s anti-hero (yes, they had them back then too!) when he says in the final scene, “You will please to observe in the case of my deportment the contrast between a gentleman who has read Chesterfield and received the polish of Europe and an unpolished, untraveled American.” The joke is that his sophistication and polish has not stopped him from becoming a hypocrite and a cheat while the American hero has retained his honesty and ideals. It would take another 100 years before Henry James would investigate this same theme in his greatest novels.
However, every scene is a study in contrasts: the old father and the young daughter; the Anglophile and the Yankee; the heroine’s choice of duty to her father versus her desires; New York City upper-crust ladies versus the rural Massachusetts visitors; the wartime veteran dallying with the society lady; the European tradition versus the American ethos; and the hypocrite up against the honest man. The themes are entirely valid today and the questions the play asks continue to be relevant. That this is a first play and written in three weeks makes its elegance and urbanity truly remarkable.
The Contrast introduces wealthy Anglophile Billy Dimple who has just returned to New York from a tour of England. His first-hand encounter with British culture has turned him into a dandy and a libertine. Engaged since childhood to marry Maria (daughter of the wealthy merchant Van Rough), Dimple (born Van Dumpling) pursues her two society friends Letitia and Charlotte simultaneously, while they are two-timing each other. When Charlotte’s highly principled brother, Colonel Manly, a Revolutionary War hero, arrives from Boston, he accidentally encounters Maria with whom he falls in love without knowing her name.
Unbeknownst to him, Maria has also been smitten but wishes to follow her duty to her father’s wishes. Her displeasure with Dimple’s dishonest ways causes her a real moral crisis. Manly is similarly conflicted when he later discovers that Maria is engaged to be married. A subplot concerns Manly’s country bumpkin servant Jonathan who is introduced to manners by Dimple’s elegant but pretentious servant Jessamy.
The play’s historical importance is based on having created the stage character of the honest but uncultivated Yankee in Jonathan, and the scenes in which Jessamy attempts to give him culture ought to be hilarious. Unfortunately, Brad Fraizer has not found the right style for Jonathan and he fails to get the laughs that he deserves. Part of the problem is that except for Bryan Close’s Dimple and Amanda Jones’ Charlotte, the production eschews any accents or dialects that would define the characters’ background or social position. This has the effect of making the characters sound contemporary but fails to define their social class, an important part of this comedy in which the servants ape their masters.
The women are generally more nuanced than the men with Jones as Charlotte, Tovah Suttle as Letitia and Maria Silverman as Maria Van Rough creating three dimensional characters with intentionally varying degrees of affectations. Rob Skolits makes Col. Manly a stalwart, personable hero while Close’s use of mannerisms and gesture define Dimple’s pretensions and phony refinement. As the wealthy but materialistic Van Rough, George C. Hosmer is a bit too modern to seem comfortable in the 1787 setting. Matt Renskers’ Jessamy needs to be more mannered and affected to make the contrast with the simple, unpolished Jonathan work.
The choice of using plain, nondescript costumes to focus on the manners and the language is a noble attempt to let the comedy speak for itself. Unfortunately, Sidney Fortner’s use of colored tank tops for all of the characters provides its own distraction – the men look too muscular while the women look like they are on their way to a summer beach party. Roe’s use of two mannequins, one male, one female, dressed in the height of fashion for the eighteenth century, is a clever representation of the excesses of the colonial rich but the mannequins get in the way of the action. Even large hats or some other prop might have pointed up the satire more clearly.
Alex Roe’s revival of The Contrast, America’s first original comedy on native themes, generally makes Tyler’s humor and wit come to life even after 222 years. The attempt to make the play seem contemporary by putting the actors in modern dress while the plot parodies the fashionable excesses of 1787 only partially works. What this production does make clear is that The Contrast is an American classic whose themes still speak to us today.
The Contrast (through November 1)
Metropolitan Playhouse, 220 E. 4th Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212-995-5302 or http://www.metropolitanplayhouse.org
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