“The Drunkard” continues through Oct. 17 at the Metropolitan
Playhouse, 220 East Fourth Street, East Village; (212) 995-5302,
metropolitanplayhouse.org.
Reviewed by Erik Haagensen
September 24, 2010
W.H. Smith's 1844 play "The Drunkard" is a seminal work in American
social and theatrical history. It was the nation's most popular drama
until the advent of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and it is generally credited
as having given a significant boost to the growing temperance movement,
which culminated in the 1920 enactment of Prohibition. Metropolitan
Playhouse, as part of its season devoted to stereotypes, is providing a
rare opportunity to see this landmark work. Unfortunately, Francis X.
Kuhn's naturalistic, unfocused direction fails to set the script's
melodramatic heart to beating.
And what a melodrama it is. Young, goodhearted Edward Middleton is
lured down the pathways of alcoholic vice by the evil Squire Cribbs, a
veritable Snidely Whiplash, who hated the boy's father and so is
seeking revenge. Edward marries the pure Mary Wilson, who lives with
her aged mother in a rented cottage on Edward's newly inherited
property, after he prevents Cribbs from engineering the women's
eviction. Feigning friendship, Cribbs introduces Edward to the joys of
brandy. It only takes a couple of drinks for the lad to become a raging
alcoholic and make his wife's and daughter's lives a misery. The shamed
Edward flees his bucolic village for New York City, where Cribbs
continues to steer him on a downward spiral until Arden Rencelaw, a
reformed alcoholic turned do-gooder, steps in. Rencelaw saves Edward
with a snap of his fingers; then, together, they go about Cribbs'
undoing.
All the techniques of melodrama—asides, ridiculous coincidences, florid
language, black-and-white morality, direct audience address—abound, but
the company underplays rather than embraces them. Actor after actor
gets lost in the purple period verbiage, causing important plot points
to slide by unnoticed. Best of the lot is Ben Gougeon, who as William
Dowton, Edward's younger foster brother, at least finds a consistent
stylization for this country rube with a sweet soul. Also notable is
Kendall Rileigh as Agnes, William's mad sister. Rileigh seizes her two
scenes—one mad and one sane—and doesn't let go.
As Edward, Michael Hardart, though admirably focused, needs an infusion
of Delsarte-style acting. Howard Thoresen, who in his younger days
played Edward, is miscast as the nasty squire, offering a far too mild
and at times even jovial presence in a part that calls for some serious
cape twirling.
Though a published preface to the script claims that playwright Smith's
performance as Edward featured "the most natural, effective acting ever
seen" in Boston, where the play premiered, what was considered
naturalistic then is a very different kettle of fish. If "The Drunkard"
is to work at all today, it needs to be much bigger and bolder while
still remaining truthful.
Martin Denton · September 20, 2010
Thanks to Eugene O'Neill and a bunch of other people, American
drama learned about psychology and, later, postmodern ideology, and as
a result the simplicity of the morality play was generally abandoned. I
don't know about you, but I kind of miss it: I like a play, sometimes,
that is absolutely clear about what's right and what's wrong, with nary
a shred of ambiguity or complexity or irony in evidence.
Such a play is W.H. Smith's The Drunkard, which is
now being presented—delightfully; without ambiguity, complexity, or
irony—at one of my favorite theatres, the invaluable Metropolitan
Playhouse in Alphabet City. Written in the 1840s by a Welshman who
emigrated to America earlier in the 19th century, this is as archetypal
an American melodrama as there is. As soon as you meet each of its
characters, you know immediately which category—Good, Evil, or
Foolish—he or she fits into. Don't worry, they won't stray out of it,
even if, as this title character certainly does, they flirt with
terrible Temptation along the way.
The Drunkard's temptation, as you can easily guess, is Drink.
The temperance movement was still pretty young in the
1840s, and in Smith's play they received the best kind of propaganda:
this is a drama about how alcohol—in the form of brandy or whiskey, in
this story—can lead to calamitous ruin. Our hero Edward Middleton
starts off as the most upright young man imaginable: he's well-off,
well-educated (but, in the grand American tradition, probably not too
well-educated), well-mannered, and possessed of a strong
sense of morality. But he's a little bit partial to the booze, and when
his arch-nemesis Squire Cribbs finds this out, he is led on a seemingly
inexorable path to ruin. By Intermission, Edward has left sobriety
behind and gotten involved in more than one barroom brawl. By the
story's climax, he is on Skid Row, he has deserted his family, and has
no source of income and no home. The Devil Drink—abetted by the Evil
Squire Cribbs—has apparently claimed another victim.
It won't ruin things to tell you that a happy ending is store
for all except Squire Cribbs (but the audience will be well satisfied
by how he ends up, too; you can easily imagine the less restrained
audiences of the 1800s wildly cheering this villain's downfall). It's
easy to smile at Smith's contrived and often illogical dramaturgy, but
there's something very pleasing about knowing just where the playwright
stands on a subject: no Mametian hedging or Lettsian excuse-making,
just a clear and resounding condemnation that sends us out of the
theatre well convinced of what we need to do to lead upstanding lives.
Under the deft direction of Francis X. Kuhn, The Drunkard
comes to life vividly and entertainingly in this production. Kuhn
doesn't shy from the piece's presentational style, and in fact
elaborates on it with the addition of several temperance songs
interspersed throughout the proceedings. Matthew Allar (set), Sidney
Fortner (costumes), and Christopher Weston (lighting) provide a modest
but entirely appropriate and evocative look for the show, while fight
director Scott Barrow stages the fights with the slightest of winks as Batman-esque
pow!-bam!-zonk!
battles that feel completely in tune with White's modus
operandi.
The cast is exemplary. Michael Hardart is wonderfully
sympathetic as poor Edward Middleton, showing us both the upstanding,
promising "before" version as well as the down-on-his-luck and
at-the-end-of-his-rope "after." Ben Gougeon charms as Edward's
half-brother Bill, who is the ingenious Yankee stock character in this
stew, while Charlotte Hampden is dizzily over-the-top as Miss Spindle,
a daffy spinster who sets her cap on Edward until his downfall.
Stealing the show out from under them, appropriately enough, is Howard
Thoresen as dastardly Cribbs, a fellow so e-vill that you
half expect him at any moment to start twirling his moustache and tying
random young women to railroad tracks. Thoresen revels in the
unmotivated nastiness of his character, and in the constant misguided
trust all of the others seem to place in him, past actions glaringly be
dashed.
Smith's writing is old-fashioned, no doubt about it; I found
it instructive, though, to suss out its antecedents—Edward gets a
couple of would-be Shakespearean soliloquies, while Miss Spindle feels
like a less articulate cousin to any number of characters in Sheridan
comedies. Mainly, I enjoyed and appreciated the opportunity
Metropolitan Playhouse gives us here to witness The Drunkard
more or less as Smith wrote it and as our American antecedents saw it
more than a century ago, when our country's provincialism was more a
matter of fact than of pride. Journeys backward into our history are
always instructive, though not always this much fun; I heartily
recommend The Drunkard for its insight into the evolution of
our national character and its odds-defying playworthiness in 2010.