Theatre in Review: The Silver Cord (Peccadillo Theater Company/Theatre at St. Clement's)"I say this about children: Have them. Love them. Leave them be." This eminently sensible advice, voiced by one of the characters in The Silver Cord, is most assuredly not in practice on stage at St. Clement's these nights. Mrs. Phelps, the central figure of Sidney Howard's 1926 domestic shocker, follows a philosophy that might best be described as: Have them. Smother them. Eat them alive. Mrs. Phelps is hosting a little house party for her two sons and the women in their lives, and, in less than 24 hours, this charming, tea-serving matron manages to wreak the maximum amount of havoc on them all. Having been introduced to her new daughter-in-law, she belittles the young woman's profession (she's a biologist) and swiftly undermines the young couple's plan to live in New York. Instead, she proposes a sure-fire plan to launch her son's architecture career at home; as for his wife, well, there's a little room at the local hospital where she can putter about with a microscope -- if she really must. This is just the warm-up. During one of her cozy fireside chats, Mrs. Phelps persuades her other son that his fiancée isn't in love with him and should be dispatched as quickly as possible. When the outraged young lady, desperate to escape this house of psychological horrors, tries to call a taxi, Mrs. Phelps, afraid of the gossip that might follow from such an exit, simply pulls the telephone cord out of the wall. This is enough to drive the thwarted girl out of the house, in winter, onto the adjacent pond where the ice is perilously thin. As the two young men race to save her from a watery death, Mrs. Phelps' only reaction is to urge them to wear their overcoats. It took about five minutes before I realized that Mrs. Phelps was being played by a man (Dale Carman, gotten up in tweeds and a gray wig, greeting everyone with an absolutely lethal smile.) This might seem a strange choice for an otherwise straightforward revival, but it is the key to Dan Wackerman's production. Howard's script, steeped in the pop Freudian concepts of the 1920s, makes it abundantly clear that in her heart Mrs. Phelps desires to marry one or both of her sons. The script's deadly serious treatment of this situation may seem outlandish, but it stops short of camp. Howard was a master craftsman, and even at its most ridiculous, The Silver Cord remains surprisingly watchable. (I was constantly reminded of Leave Her to Heaven, the lavishly appointed 1945 20th-Century Fox melodrama in which Gene Tierney's love for Cornel Wilde is so all-consuming that she murders his crippled younger brother and aborts her baby to preserve their singular intimacy. Like The Silver Cord, it's laughable, except you can't, somehow.) Carman's performance is thoroughly artificial yet somehow right for the occasion. He makes Mrs. Phelps' simpering, sentimental manner into the thinnest of screens behind which her ruthlessness is entirely visible. "It's only Mother," she trills before each entrance, and you can be sure that mayhem will follow in her wake. Carman is supported by a young cast with a solid grasp of period acting style. As David, the favored of Mrs. Phelps' two sons, Thomas Mathew Kelley must deal with a part that has a large hole in it. Deeply devoted to Mrs. Phelps, he has nevertheless stayed away from home for two years and has chosen to get married behind his mother's back -- actions that suggest a deep ambivalence that the script never addresses. Still, when Mrs. Phelps crawls into David's bed for a midnight talk and plants a lengthy kiss on his lips, the look of pained bewilderment on Kelley's face speaks volumes. As David's wife, Christina, who finds herself at first politely fencing with Mrs. Phelps over tea and later staging a full-on assault in order to save her marriage, Victoria Mack makes a convincing antagonist. She overdoes the nervous mannerisms here and there, but she also does well by a bittersweet monologue about her student days in Heidelberg. The role of Robert, the second son, is also problematic; he's a clueless case of arrested adolescence, and Howard drops very broad hints -- for example, Robert's keen interest in interior décor -- that strongly suggest he shouldn't be marrying a woman at all. But Wilson Bridges somehow manages to bypass the character's startling lack of self-knowledge to create an appealing man-boy. Caroline Kaplan is a strikingly natural presence as Robert's fiancée, who has a nice way with a wisecrack. ("Have you ever noticed how every baby looks like Chief Justice Taft?") Harry Feiner's living room set, which places three separate window/wall units against a cyclorama depicting a winter landscape, is certainly striking; it is also filled with detailed examples of period furniture. (The play is set in 1926, but clearly Mrs. Phelps furnished it a quarter-century earlier; the effect is properly stifling: a house frozen in time.) I do wish that Wackerman had more clearly designated the characters' entrances and exits; at times they appear to be walking through walls. Also, the set adapts quite awkwardly into David's bedroom. Feiner's lighting is solid, as is Tae Jong Park's sound design, which bridges the scenes with increasingly sinister snatches of melodies from a music box. The characters in The Silver Cordhave money, and Gail Cooper-Hecht has seen to it that the ladies are outfitted in fine examples of jewel-toned period evening gowns. She also cleverly dresses Robert in boyish outfits that emphasize his emotional dependency on Mrs. Phelps. The Silver Cord may be an artifact of another theatrical era, but it is a fascinating one, with a hair-raising central figure, and Wackerman's production gives it a fair airing. Good thing they waited until after Mother's Day to open it. -- David Barbour 
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