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In a Garden
Philip Barry, like Noel Coward, was a master at devising comedies about the rich and
sophisticated. His best known play, Philadelphia Story made Katherine Hepburn
a star.
However, styles in comedy change with the times and when you revive a comedy from a by-gone
era, it works best if the revival is cloaked in the mantel of its past hit status, and dressed up with a
beautiful production and a cast with as much box office magnetism as possible. A case in point
from this Broadway season: Noel Coward's Present Laughter stylishly staged and starring Frank Langella, (not to mention an adorable Dachshund), is a case in point. A case in point from Off-Broadway was The Drama
Department's smart new interpretation of June Moon.
When passing those trunks filled with the less-than-spectacular works that are part of every
playwright's life it's the wise producer who keeps walking and lets those sleeping flops lie in
peaceful oblivion.
And that's what the Pecadillo Theater Company should have done when they considered Philip
Barry's In the Garden. When this rueful
comedy about a woman whose dramatist husband arrogantly misunderstood her was produced on Broadway in 1925 it was a literary
success but even the redoubtable Laurette Taylor in the starring role couldn't keep it running for more than a meager 40 performances. It's hardly likely that the bare-bones revival currently being given
In the Garden will give Barry's play the luster it never
had. The darker side of the comedy simply doesn't work here and the humor, except for a line
here and there, simply doesn't resonate.
The actors are fair to middling, the direction slow and
awkward. Jim Scholfield as Adrian Terry should not be asked to pick up his wife or flip himself
onto a couch. The wife Lissa as played by Lillian Langford had me so worried that her 3/4
stockings would fall down, that I lost track of the lines. Speaking of lines, the best one is quoted
on the program: "The heart never tires of imagined possibilities, does it? It tires only of
possibilities realized." --Adrian Terry
Substitute theater goer for heart, and it about sums up this production.
You're welcome to prove me wrong in my opinion--In the Garden is set to play
at the Kraine on East 4th Street through 3/16.
©right February 1997, Elyse Sommer, CurtainUp.
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