Some years ago on The Tonight Show, host Jack Paar asked actor/ playwright/raconteur Robert Morley his definition of good theater. The veteran entertainer said, “Four people come out, sit on a sofa, and talk.”
What he was describing in succinct terms was drawing-room comedy, a traditional category we don’t see too often these days. Indeed, when on the rare occasions the very form comes up in conversation, snickering might be heard. These days any playwright who sits down at his or her computer to compose a drawing-room comedy is barking up a withering tree. Drawing-room comedies came to be long before writers knew what a computer was.
Nevertheless, drawing-room comedies—in which members, usually of the supposedly sophisticated upper-classes engage in witty and often revealing chatter—offered any number of rewards. So much so that in these far more demotic times (and likely since John Osborne’s 1956 Look Back in Anger changed the theater landscape), it’s a perhaps small pity that the drawing-room comedy has been unceremoniously exiled to the scullery.
All the more reason to cheer Jonathan Bank, the Mint Theater Company artistic director and director, who devotes his attentions to forgotten plays that deserve more than the general oblivion to which they’ve been assigned.
A few pre-pandemic seasons back during his ceaseless search, he discovered an intriguing drawing-room piece cheekily dubbed Yours Unfaithfully that actor/playwright Miles Malleson crafted in 1933. Snatching it up for the gem it is, he gave it a production of great sheen and suasion. Bank himself directed it with a master’s touch, Ernst Lubitsch/George Cukor-like. Max von Essen, Elisabeth Gray, Mikaela Izquierdo, Todd Cerveris, and Stephen Schnetzer played it as if to the manner and the manor born.
Now in the Streaming Series of previous Mint productions, the play is again available and no less than a must for theater lovers who remain drawing-room comedy partisans as well as for those who would like to know, aside from the fewer and fewer Noel Coward revivals, what they were like.
In Yours Unfaithfully not just four but five characters come out to occupy the sofa and additional chairs set designer Caroline Miraz supplies. They’re the marrieds Stephen (von Essen) and Anne Meredith (Gray); recently widowed Diana Streatfield (Izquierdo); family friend Dr. Alan Kirby (Cerveris); and the Rev. Canon Gordon Meredith (Schnetzer), Stephen’s father. (Incidentally, Gordon is so agitated by his son’s iconoclastic behavior that he never gets to sit.)
As those gathered in the inviting home the Merediths have somewhere in the countryside near London, the breezy act-one banter gets its wind up when Stephen discovers he’s attracted to Diana. Whereupon Anne, resorting to a sophistication she believes she inhabits as suavely as her modish frock (Hunter Kaczorowski, the costumer), encourages the two to pursue an affair.
Comes act two and some couple of months later, Anne realizes she’s not feeling so blithe about the arrangement. On the contrary, she’s hurt and regretting it. Likewise, Stephen changes his cavalier opinions amid a flood of second thoughts. Their revelations include the others and lead to Stephen’s altering a week-long Vienna stop for Diana and him. Paris for a weekend break-up seems wiser.
Which leads to act three when Anne and Stephen have moved to a claustrophobic London flat they keep. Guilt weighing him down, Stephen has cut short the Paris idol only to discover that Anne, who, by the way, dallied in the past, has had a weekend date of her own, a date to be followed by another. That’s when Malleson has them admit to their conflicted feelings while coming to an ending that isn’t exactly happy but, in its bow to reality, is inspired all the same.
In other words, treating an open marriage, Yours Unfaithfully is somewhat more sophisticated for the earlier 1930s than those audiences may have readily accepted. More to the point, the comedy (?) can be viewed as probing drawing-room sophistication and judging it superficial, limited. Stephen and Anne, as convivially glib as they are, enjoy putting on a show of sophistication while falling emotionally short of living up to it.
The fact is that, evidently due to its forward thinking, Yours Unfaithfully was not produced in 1933 or for many decades thereafter. It was up to visionary Banks to give it a world premiere, now streamed here. The unfortunate result at the time for Malleson—a cherished character actor then and valued to a certain extent for his plays—has never been ranked with the field’s leaders. Had this one been presented then, theater history may have been revised. So thank Bank and his players for their very welcome belated correction.
Yours Unfaithfully was streamed beginning March 22, 2021 and will remain online through May 16. Information and link to free streaming: minttheater.org
