Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – A trio of Off-Broadway plays discusses what it means to be poor in our capitalist society

• By drediman
• April 6, 2016
• No Comments

Currently on the boards of our Off-Broadway theaters are a trio of plays (one a revival of a rarely-seen Shaw play and two new plays) that explore what it means to be poor, particularly in our capitalist society. These plays participate in this discourse from three distinct vantage points – from the perspectives of the controlling class, the descending middle class, and the steely lower class.

George Bernard Shaw’s fascinatingly cynical first play (which he, according to the program, completed in 1892), Widowers’ Houses (RECOMMENDED), recently enjoyed a stylish and sharply-acted mounting by director David Staller for TACT and the Gingold Theatrical Group at Theatre Row. The play commences innocuously enough in Germany, where a vacationing young English doctor, Harry Trench (an excellent Jeremy Beck), falls in love with Blanche Sartorius (a marvelously tempestuous Talene Monahon), a wealthy young woman who is also vacationing with her father (forcefully and intelligently played by Terry Layman). The play really gets into Shavian territory when Trench finds out that his fiancé’s wealth comes from her father’s profiteering as a slum landlord. Trench morally struggles with this news, causing a rift between him and his hot-headed betrothed. Ultimately, Shaw’s play is an unflinching commentary on the inescapability of the poor’s exploitation by capitalist society’s landlords, who view that the poor simply cannot be helped. Trench’s crushing realization of this truth, despite all his good intentions, chillingly ends the play (especially as directed by Mr. Staller).

Mona Mansour’s uneven but highly entertaining and funny new play The Way West (RECOMMENDED), which is currently enjoying an extended run courtesy of Labyrinth Theater Company, is an interesting counterpoint to Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses. The play, which depicts the self-inflicted financial deterioration of a Western-loving, middle-aged middle-class woman and her two adult daughters, is a defiant cry for individualism against the monolithic capitalist system. Even if it’s a battle that can’t be won, as proven by Shaw in his Widowers’ Houses, Ms. Mansour’s play makes us wonder whether it’s a path worth taking. As these women’s assets and income prospects dwindle, they become more alive and increasingly seductive – if frustrating – people, especially as performed by the terrific trio of Deidre O’Connell, Anna O’Donoghue, and Nadia Bowers, who play “Mom” and the two daughters, respectively. Mimi O’Donnell’s production for Labyrinth excels in its ability to depict the naturalistic intimacy of domestic life and the surreal expansiveness of the West and the stifled American spirit.

I first saw Martyna Majok’s powerful new play Ironbound (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED) at Round House Theatre in Bethesda, Maryland last fall as part of the DC-area’s triumphant Women’s Voices Theater Festival and admired it greatly. Daniella Topol, who directed the piece at Round House, has restaged the play at the far more intimate Rattlestick space to even more effective results. Ironbound in its current New York incarnation is simple, focused and gritty, and its fantasia-like portrait of a Polish immigrant cleaning lady cum factory worker (a woman named Darja), as portrayed with astonishing forcefulness by Marin Ireland, is a warts-and-all love letter to America’s working class, on which this country was and is built on. Here’s a women who, despite some significant personal and financial setbacks, has managed to survive. Unlike the pseudo-delusional, reckless women in Ms. Mansour’s The Way West, who stake a claim on the American Dream simply by being descendants of strong Western folk, Ms. Majok’s scrappy and transactional Darja, in her steadfastness and ferocity, fights for it with her blood and tears. Mr. Sartorius, watch out!

WIDOWERS’ HOUSES
Off-Broadway, Play
TACT and Gingold Theatrical Group at the Beckett Theatre
2 hours (with one intermission)
Closed

THE WAY WEST
Off-Broadway, Play
Labyrinth Theater Company at the Bank Street Theater
1 hour, 40 minutes (without an intermission)
Through April 10

IRONBOUND
Off-Broadway, Play
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater and Women’s Project Theater
1 hour, 30 minutes (without an intermission)
Through April 24