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The ragtime music that opens Clyde Fitch’s melodrama The City is not simply a musical marker setting the scene. By adding syncopation to the melody, ragtime became the signature for a culture deciding how to adapt the old rules to a new age. The play, written in 1909, presents a dilemma that is very modern. In a society preoccupied with the acquisition of wealth and power, do we make up our own rules or live by the old ones? The play provides a variety of answers to these still pertinent questions. The Rand family, with the exception of George Rand, Sr. (Michael Durkin), has a "New York bee in their bonnets," and wants to move from the comfortable suburb of Middleburgh to the big city. Rand, Sr., prefers to stay in a town where they are "it," rather than move to a city where they will be "nit." He conveniently dies of a heart attack, though not before privately imparting to his son, George, Jr. (Michael Hardart), a few family secrets that could besmirch the father’s reputation for honesty and integrity.

The family makes the move to New York where the daughters (Teresa Kelsey, Tricia Smith) are confident they will make better marriages, the son can ascend to the heights of money and power, and their mother (Ruthanne Gereghty) will enjoy the city delights, including finding a better dressmaker. All of these ends are quickly achieved. George is on the verge of being nominated for governor, when a skeleton from the father’s past, a "rotten specimen" named Fred Hannock (Andrew Firda), appears on the scene. Hannock plans to blackmail George on a variety of fronts, from the shady business dealings of Rand, Sr., perpetuated by his son, to the father’s questionable connection to Hannock’s deceased mother. Hannock will stop at nothing to achieve his ends, even marrying George’s youngest sister, the impressionable Cicely. With not only the governorship but also his engagement to the impeccably honest Eleanor Vorhees (Annette Previti) hanging in the balance, George must decide whether to do the right thing, for which he will undoubtedly suffer, or the wrong thing, which will guarantee his continued success. The play still has the ability to make the audience gasp when secrets are revealed—even Hannock has a surprise coming to him—but George’s predicament makes the play more than a melodrama, as the character faces complex issues without easy answers.

In The City, Fitch presents complicated individuals living in a self-interested age. As George’s friend, the straight-arrow Burt Vorhees (Tod Mason), reminds him, the country’s motto is E Pluribus Unum, not E Pluribus Meum. Yet, the pursuit of happiness becomes even trickier when the greater good, rather than the desires of a single individual, is invoked.  Director Yvonne Conybeare makes creative use of a small playing area, although a few members of the generally capable cast are not quite audible even in the tight quarters of the Metropolitan Playhouse. Tod Mason as Burt Vorhees and Teresa Kelsey as the elder sister, Tess Rand, fare the best on this front and present convincing characters. Andrew Firda has just the right weasely lack of charm as Fred Hannock, and he makes the villain more than just an evil-doer.  Costume designer Melissa Estro is to be commended for achieving sartorial splendor on a limited budget. The men, in particular, are well dressed.

Although his plays are little known and infrequently performed, Clyde Fitch wrote characters that are more complex than the melodramatic standard of his day. The author is perhaps best known for The Girl With Green Eyes (1902), a realistic study of jealousy, notable for its psychological sophistication. There should be an audience for a drama that entertains as a good melodrama should, but also challenges the audience to question its own standards and practices.

--Laura Shea, 10/1/2003

Reviewed by Martin Denton

By the time The City reaches its sensational climax, George Rand, Jr., the rich and successful businessman who is its hero, has gotten embroiled in a murder, a case of incest, a family marital scandal, and a web of shady and probably illegal business dealings, all converging to bring him down on the very day that he's been nominated for the governorship of New York. Now if George were alive today, in the face of such certain ruination, he'd write a book and then sell the rights to TV. But George is a creature of his own time, a century ago, or at least of the rigid morality that prevailed in public a century ago, in the theatre of Clyde Fitch, who invented George when he wrote The City. And so the play ends not with cynical ambiguity but with reassuring absolutism: the bad people get punished, and the good people expiate their sins and prosper (spiritually, at least).

Such is the value of a play like The City, and the fine work done by Metropolitan Playhouse, letting us see where we came from so that we may better understand where we are now and how we got here. The City is a fascinator: written just before World War I exploded thinking people's ideas about how the so-called civilized world was supposed to work, it went out of fashion almost immediately and never really received a second look. But notwithstanding its staunchly old-fashioned values, it's a modern play for 1909: It marked the first time that "goddamn" was uttered on an American stage; more importantly, in a culture steeped since the time of Jefferson in the innate superiority of the utopian rural ideal, The City offered a firm defense of urban life. Fitch makes it clear that his characters are pure or wicked all on their own: it's not the city that makes them that way.

A word, now, about those characters, who are well-drawn and compelling. At the play's center is George Rand, the son and heir of a banking entrepreneur from upstate New York. The elder Rand was, we learn, something of a low-end robber baron. George insists, after his father dies early in the play, on moving the family to New York and expanding both his business and his influence, until in Act II he's on the verge of that gubernatorial nomination I mentioned earlier. The other Rands are behind him 100%, from his mother who yearns to leave the stultifying small town life to his elder sister Tess, who marries (disastrously, it turns out) a fast-talking sharpie, to younger sister Cicely, naive and eager and, it develops, in love with the very dangerous Fred Hannock.

Hannock is George's confidential secretary; before that, he was a small-time hoodlum who was blackmailing the senior Rand. We understand quickly that Hannock is Rand's illegitimate son; his proximity has made him party to the business excesses of both father and son. He's a drug addict to boot (why not?; remember, the evil people are REALLY evil in Clyde Fitch's world). Somewhat improbably, Hannock doesn't know that Rand was his father, which enables the incest angle to become the fabulous, shocking driver of the play's climax.

It's all enormously watchable, as well as—see above—thoroughly instructive: we can learn so much about the American character of today through the prism of popular American drama of 1909. The Metropolitan has done the piece well, with a fine ensemble led by Michael Hardart (stalwart if perhaps a bit too modern as George, Jr.) and Andrew Firda (splendidly, understatedly rotten as Hannock). Ruthanne Gereghty has some wonderful moments conveying the intransigence and hypocrisy of Mrs. Rand; there's fine work, too, from Patrick J. Curley as the Rands' butler Foot and Annette Previti as George's long-suffering, very nearly too-good-to-be-true love interest, Eleanor Vorhees.

The production is not without its problems, the only really important one being the odd butchering that seems to have been done to the play's first act, which here has been rearranged and shorn of much helpful exposition. I suspect that the objective was simply to make the play shorter; but the results are jarring and sometimes confusing, disturbing both the play's linear chronology and unwaveringly straightforward narrative structure.

But once we arrive in Act Two—which comes quickly here, thanks to all the cuts—we are firmly in Fitch's capable hands, and The City starts to work its particular magic. We feel reassured and probably a little bit superior that we no longer live in a world of moral absolutism. And yet, lingering in Fitch's world for these couple hours makes our contemporary superiority feel that much less certain: a ha!—Fitch can still shake up an audience, even today.

Reviewed By Karl Levett

Nearly 100 years ago, Clyde Fitch was considered America's finest playwright. His last produced play, "The City," has not been seen in New York, the city of the title, since its original production in 1909. Now, the Metropolitan Playhouse, which creatively explores America's theatrical heritage, is presenting a neatly tailored version of this important play, a significant steppingstone for 20th-century American drama. If, in our dreams, America ever had an equivalent to Britain's National Theatre, this is the very kind of play that would cry out for presentation. Here, it is left to the limited resources of Off-Off Broadway. Anyone interested in the history of American playwriting should hie themselves immediately to East Fourth Street and offer a practical thank you to the Metropolitan for giving us the chance to examine the wonder that was Clyde Fitch.

It must be remembered that "The City" is still a creature of its time and is replete with its own built-in flaws. Thus we have sensationalism that includes drug addiction, murder, and incest (audible gasp from audience members), plus a happy ending where the principal character does The Right Thing. But, as well, we are given a diverse group of solidly constructed characters, a gripping plot, fast-flowing natural dialogue, and enough moral dilemmas to satisfy Arthur Miller. The central theme of the pernicious effect of the city has echoes of Dreiser and Sinclair, but Fitch provides a spirited defense that will cheer the heart of any true New Yorker.

The sins-of-the-father plot has George Rand, Jr. (Michael Hardart) pitted against dastardly Fred Hannock (Andrew Firda). Under Yvonne Conybeare's fluid direction, Hardart provides a remarkably believable interpretation of a man in crisis. Strong, viable characters are also created by Tod Mason and Teresa Kelsey. But it is Clyde Fitch who is the star here; catch him while you can.

Reviewed by Alexis Soloski

The younger Rands, members of the first family of Middleburgh, New York, have taken a shine to the Big Apple.  Cicely, the youngest, bleats, "Who wants to smell new-mown hay when he could smell gasoline on Fifth Avenue?"  This line may baffle urban audiences enjoying the Metropolitan Playhouse's revival of Clyde Fitch's 1915 melodrama The City—after all, many of us spend considerable hours swooning over bargain fares and real estate listings in our efforts to abandon the metropolis.  (New-mown hay sounds positively exotic!)  But Manhattan's attractions—the pace, the fashion, the opportunities for romance—and its dangers—the anonymity, the brittleness, the moral relativism—remain nearly unchanged.

 Director Yvonne Conybeare hasn't veiled the play's lurid elements (incest, murder, drug addiction), yet she seems to find character more compelling than plot.  She concentrates primarily on the ethical dilemmas of George Rand Jr. (Michael Hardart) as he struggles to keep his business and political career intact while fending off the imprecations of his con artist confidential secretary Hannock (played with smirking susurration by Andrew Firda).  Though occasionally mannered, neither the performances nor the script prove too stiff. The works of Fitch—and indeed much of early-20th-century drama—rarely see the light of stage, but the Metropolitan provides a fine illumination.