Elm Shakespeare Company opens its summer season Thursday night with a comedy of capitalism that its director calls a “neglected masterpiece in the American canon.”
Philip Barry’s Holiday, a play about trying to get rich and then figuring out if it’s worth it, debuted in New York 11 months before Black Friday triggered the Great Depression in 1929.
It’s hard to think of a work more appropriate to our era of million-dollar bonuses and now deep unemployment. It runs in repertory with Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid, at Edgerton Park through Sept. 6.
Elm Shakespeare’s founder and the play’s director, James Andreassi (pictured right with set designer Jamie Burnett), called the play, which he began to research during the recent meltdown, “eerily prescient.”
In the play, Johnny Case must choose between Julia and Linda, the two daughters of the extraordinarily wealthy banker Edward Seton. Julia has Edward’s values, which are conservative and lead to the worship of the god of wealth. Linda is a bit more liberal, or lost, depending on your point of view. She wants Johnny, who’s just made a killing worth about $20,000 in Seabord Utilities, to follow his dream, which is to enjoy the wealth he already has and use it to discover what he truly likes in life.
“Our dotcom people,” said Andreassi, “did just that,” earning just enough to live well on,” so they can then discover something deeper than the pursuit of more wealth.”
All poor Johnny seems to know that he likes is swimming and not to accumulate more bucks right now. That puts him perilously close to being, by Edward’s lights, a dreaded “idler” living off his wife’s income.
Yet Johnny is not only good looking. He also believes in this value firmly, which attracts Linda, tossing her into conflict with her sense of loyalty because Johnny’s already proposed to the more conservative Julia. There’s a lot of genuine conflict here.
The play is about, according to Andreassi, “what constitutes success.”
But it’s about a lot more, according to Alvin Epstein (pictured). Epstein plays Seton. Epstein’s long career includes the American premieres of Samuel Beckett’s groundbreaking Waiting for Godot and Endgame; yet he’s never been in a Philip Barry play.
He called the play “a revelation.” He said that until he took this role, he knew Barry only through the 1938 George Cukor-directed movie with Cary Grant as Johnny and Katherine Hepburn as Linda. Compared to the play, that movie was, Epstein said, a breezy comedy.
By contrast, “the play has real dramatic depth,” Epstein said, during a break Wednesday afternoon, as the cast rushed through a rehearsal before the heavens rained on the full dress rehearsal. “Nothing is treated just for the audience to laugh at. There’s a lot of funny dialogue, but it’s based in character. “
Raphael Massie, who plays Linda’s friend Nick Potter, agreed. “One thing an actor loves is a good script,” he said. He said he felt the play, which Barry followed with the better known Philadelphia Story, was not so much about money but the decisions people make about money and where that lands them “on the social and status ladder.”
Alvin Epstein took a step further. His character, banker Seton, is the least sympathetic character in the play. Yet, Epstein points out the stresses he’s under, with a drunkard of a son, a lost daughter Linda, and only Julia, who shares his values of business, profit, and the accumulation of wealth.
So that “the play is in a strange and subtle way subversive,” Epstein said, because Seton, who stands for these pre-eminent American values, is “the meanest person in the play.”
Andreassi said that for him, as the director, the play “kept revealing layers. The playwright it most reminds me of is Chekhov.”
He cited comparisons with The Cherry Orchard, with its scene in a children’s room or nursery being echoed in the second act of Holiday. And a kind of remorseless ticking of time, which drives the anxieties of Chekhovian characters, is also apparent in Holiday. There, declarations of engagement must be made at a New Year’s Eve party in the play’s second act, and a ship is sailing in the first.
“The clock,” Andreassi said, “is an incredibly important character, though unseen and unspoken.”
No wonder Andreassi called Holiday “a neglected masterpiece in the American cannon.” Paired with Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid it will be the first season in fourteen years that a Shakespeare play is not among the eponymous company’s offerings.
Why? Holiday, said Andreassi, also has the virtue of having a cast far smaller than most Shakespeare plays, and therefore making it more economically producible, yes, in these tough financial times.
Also starring are Tamara Hickey as Linda, Allyn Burrows as Johnny Case — whom Seton initially calls “Chase” — Keely Baisden is Julia, and Eric Brown is Ned Seton.
The curtain’s at eight, and you get to picnic beforehand on Edgerton Park’s lawns, where no matter how much vino you drink, it will be far less than the wealthy, if tormented, characters in Holiday.
New Haven's really lucky to have a guy like Jim Andreassi. Elm City Shakespeare is AWESOME!
Everybody should try to go...its free but if you like it, when they pass a jar around...cough up a few bucks...it'll make you feel good.