Theatre in Review: The Fatal Weakness (Mint Theater Company)

	Krisitin Griffith, Victoria Mack. Photo: Richard Termine

Acting students, take note: The all-but-lost art of high comedy technique has been rediscovered and is being given a glittering workout by Kristin Griffith in The Fatal Weakness. As Mrs. Ollie Espenshade, a socially prominent matron trying to cope with a straying husband, Griffith commands the stage with the air of a natural-born Park Avenue dweller. She rattles off her artificial dialogue with the speed and confidence of a veteran of the MGM stock company, converting entire paragraphs of elegantly turned sentences into a fine approximation of normal conversation. She knows exactly how to wield a handkerchief to signal various emotional states and how to pose herself on a sofa to make just the right impression.

There's much more to this performance than such admittedly brilliant tricks: Griffith parses each of Mrs. Espenshade's quicksilver mood swings, revealing the emotional logic of a woman whose comfortable and predictable existence has been thrown into disarray. And when her sitting room is invaded by various troublemaking friends and relatives, look closely and you will see something rare: an actress keeping perfectly still and listening intently to what her scene partner has to say.

That last skill is especially important, because everyone in The Fatal Weakness is forever making polite conversation, even when their lives are falling apart. Griffith knows how to play this game, investing each frivolous comment with deeper soundings of anger and regret. Contemplating an anonymous, scandal-mongering letter whose author claims to have known her father, she says with a world-weary sigh, "Old women always say they knew your father very well; and half the time they don't even know who you are." "A woman doctor!" she cries out in horror, in reference to her husband's alleged paramour. (After all, she notes, a man can always use another medical appointment.) Even when shattered by the prospective loss of her spouse, she gleefully mocks his vanity. ("I positively think he believes he looks exactly as he did when he was twenty!") And given advance warning of her husband's arrival, she pulls herself together quickly, noting, "It wouldn't please him to let him see that I had shed a tear over him." When he enters, her manners are impeccable -- naturally.

The Fatal Weakness was a vehicle for Ina Claire, generally considered the most brilliant high comedy actress of her day. It is also the kind of play that was going out of fashion even at the time of its 1946 premiere, a laughter-inflected drama about marriage and divorce built on a solid foundation of irony. The author, George Kelly (uncle of Grace and a Pulitzer Prize winner for Craig's Wife) had a sharp eye for hypocrisy and an anthropologist's awareness of the social rituals of the upper classes. There's a touch of Clare Boothe Luce in his view of wealthy, idle wives and their information-sharing networks. For example, Mrs. Espenshade gets wind of her husband's affair from her son-in-law, who got it from his aunt, who heard about it from her hairdresser, whose sister is the office nurse of that lady doctor. But the acid of Kelly's observations is tempered by doses of empathy and real insight. Mrs. Espenshade may be a bit of a fool, but she isn't an idiot, as the members of her family are about to find out.

Indeed, Mrs. Espenshade has always done exactly what was expected of her -- yet, even in her gilded surroundings, she has little to show for it. She has no career. She rarely sees her husband, Paul. Her adult daughter, Penny, hasn't much use for her. Mrs. Espenshade is a confirmed romantic, but there's something faintly pathetic about her favorite pastime, which involves sneaking into churches to witness the weddings of total strangers. As it happens, she is stronger than she knows; after the initial shock wears off, she sets out to document Paul's infidelity -- and, having done so, is very much surprised to discover that she has very little interest in playing the injured party.

Mrs. Espenshade's education in selfhood is counterpointed by the brittle, pseudo-intellectual Penny, whose trendy ideas about marriage and family have alienated Vernon, her good-natured and conventional husband. (So wrapped up in herself is Penny that, two days after Vernon leaves her, she doesn't quite realize that he is gone.) The dedicated apostle of a theory-ridden Russian child psychologist, she is far more devoted to her young son than her husband. She also believes that marriages should be dissolved at the first sign of dissatisfaction. Yet she is thrown into a tailspin when she learns that her parents may be breaking up, and is surprisingly ill-prepared to deal with a mother who can stand on her own two feet.

Griffith deftly guides Mrs. Espenshade through various stages of shock, horror, anger, and self-pity to a new kind of hard-won wisdom, and, under Jesse Marchese's subtle, polished direction, the rest of the cast matches her line for line. Cynthia Darlow is a delight as Mabel, the seen-it-all divorcée who greets Mrs. Espenshade's distress with the dry-eyed comment that "twenty-eight years is too long for any two people to put up with each other," then immediately concocts an elaborate scheme to catch Paul in the act. (It helps that she has lady friends equipped with the sort of detection skills that would give pause to Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade.) As Paul, Cliff Bemis is all hearty jokes and hail-fellow-well-met gestures -- until he is caught in a lie, and is thoroughly exposed. If Penny is a touch too unsympathetic, the failure is with Kelly, who doesn't show enough of the decent woman underneath the hard exterior, not with Victoria Mack, who plays her with considerable élan. Sean Patrick Hopkins is appealing as Vernon, who feels like a stranger in his own home. ("If I only say it's a nice day, they look at each other. And the kid says I'm not being very original -- or else she says I must have been reading Longfellow. So I just have to keep quiet, or get myself into an argument of some kind.") Patricia Kilgarriff is tartly amusing as Mrs. Espenshade's housemaid. ("I always thought weddings were sad. Especially when you know how the majority of them are going to turn out.")

It's becoming commonplace to note that Mint productions have remarkably elaborate production values, given the constraints of the company's tiny theatre. Even so, Vicki R. Davis' set, with its mirrored walls and posh furnishings, is a knockout. Christian DeAngelis' lighting clues us in to the time of day with the sunlight washes, crepuscular sunsets, and glowing moonlight visible through the apartment windows. Andrea Varga's excellent costumes include a full wardrobe for Mrs. Espenshade, among them an ivory silk peignoir, a lace-over-satin day suit, and a pink silk dress with a gathered waist; the designer also provides an amusing sight gag involving a wildly inappropriate hat and veil selected by Mrs. Espenshade for a wedding she has no business attending. Jane Shaw's sound includes all the usual effects, plus some interestingly atonal, jazzy incidental music.

The Fatal Weakness is the kind of comedy of manners that nobody does anymore, and which even in its heyday was often dismissed as trivial or frivolous. Nonsense; a world of feelings is sheathed inside its elegant dialogue, along with some very canny observations about a society whose values are in transition. The play begins with Mrs. Espenshade thinking of her failed marriage as a catastrophe; by the time it reaches its bittersweet ending, she is of a very different mind. Not too many years after that, a generation of women would find themselves agreeing with her.--David Barbour