Word: asts
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Over the past decade the AST has deserted its titular playwright eight times, but in so doing it has never gone back beyond early Shaw. Now it has reached back to the Restoration comedy of manners, and decided to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Wycherley play's first performance...
...PLAYING of Restoration comedy demands, above all, style--group style. And this is something American companies generally lack. For the current Country Wife, the AST imported the British director David Giles, best known here for having directed the bulk of the Forsyte Saga television series. Giles has been surprisingly effective in eliciting a creditable ensemble performance on this side of the Atlantic. The result is a highly entertaining show, even if it betrays some unevenness and sags a little toward the end (the text itself sags here and there, too). It would be unfair to demand the sustained glitter that...
...triumph of this production is the Margery of Carole Shelley, making her AST debut. It is an unalloyed delight to follow her progress from an innocent country wife to a sophisticated cunt-ry mistress (Wycherley surely intended the punning title). Miss Shelley has the advantage of being British herself and of knowing just how to deal with Margery's unrefined diction. How honestly she skips about on learning she has smitten a man at the theatre! What a laugh she elicits on exclaiming, "Oh jeminy!," when first introduced to the Horner she has heard about! How telling her little gasp...
...forsake the convent and wed the Duke? Still, her two lengthy interviews with Angelo, in the first half of the play, are, both intellectually and dramatically, the two great scenes in the work (partly adumbrated by Portia in The Merchant of Venice). Christina Pickles, in her debut with the AST, could use a wider vocal range: but she does manage to summon up a good deal of force in her second confrontation with Angelo...
...officer in the groin by a brothel-keeper. Ronald Frazier is amusing enough as Elbow, the malapropistic constable (a type better managed in the Dogberry of Much Ado About Nothing); and so is the clowning tapster Pompey of Rex Everhart, who has been doing such roles for the AST off and on since its first season. Gene Nye turns the disreputable Froth into a stuttering nincompoop that is vastly overdone; measure. Mr. Nye, please...