Man-About-New-York-Theater Austin Pendleton opened his classy Mint Theater revival of N. C. Hunter's 1953 A Day by the Sea only three week's ago, and here he is with his stylish take on Shelagh Delaney's 1958 A Taste of Honey, at the Pearl Theatre Co. Don't waste time asking how the polymath doe it--he directs, acts, writes, teaches. Just be grateful that he does. And certainly don't ask when he sleeps. Perhaps he doesn't.
An intriguing take on these revivals is that they're both English plays of the 1950s, but there's a chasm between them--a chasm that Pendleton vaults with no problem whatsoever.
Hunter, now close to forgotten (which makes him of immediate interest to Mint artistic director Jonathan Bank), was lauded in his time as one of the Terence Rattigan-like playwrights of the period. But Rattigan, Hunter and similar masters of the well-made play were tossed away as so many babies with the bath water when, in 1956, John Osborne's Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court and began populating the London and English-speaking stages with "Angry Young Men"--Delaney, on her arrival, considered the first "Angry Young Woman."
The discrepancy between pre-1956 and post-1956 gives Pendleton no apparent challenge. He takes both on with equal aplomb and equal results. (By they way, Rattigan's 1952 The Deep Blue Sea, currently revived by London's National Theatre, includes among its characters an extremely angry young man, not that any critics noticed back then.)
In Delany's two-act play, discontented 17-year-old Jo (Rebekah Brockman) and her sexually available 40-year-old mother Helen (Rachel Botchan) move into a barely serviceable flat in an undesirable Manchester district and proceed to go at each other over every little thing about their new digs, although they actually harbor some resisted affection for each other.
Apparently Helen, available for the price of a stiff drink, is on the run from her latest lover. She hasn't run far enough, though. Peter (Bradford Cover), the macho combatant, has tracked her to the new dwelling and, among his importunings, resorts to a marriage proposal. At first, Helen demurs but after a short while realizes she can't refuse the offer of some kind of legitimacy, if even with a philandering bruiser.
Sometime after she's departed, Jo gets involved with sweet-talking black Navy man Jimmy (Ade Otukoya)) and is happy to accept him when he proposes--which turns out to be his way of getting her into bed and pregnant.
Which leads to the second act, where Jimmy has vanished and Jo has befriended the homosexual Geoffrey, or Jeff (John Evans Reese), who not only moves in to help her pregnancy but eventually makes a play for her. To some extent, Jeff is a stand-in for the departed Helen, in that Jo and he constantly bicker at the same time as they're comfortable together, even loving. Their agitated idyll is interrupted by Helen's returning--at Jeff's instigation--as well as a volatile visit from Peter.
(Incidentally, the original Wyndham's Theatre, London cast included Avis Bunnage, Frances Cuka, Nigel Hawthorne, Murray Melvin and Clifton Jones, all of whom became regular faces during the 1960s black-and-white English film phase.)
Delaney's intention, fully realized, was to show the North England atmosphere into which she was born. The slice-of-Manchester-life she depicts is completely convincing. (A kitchen sink is mentioned, if not seen.) Her five figures go about their frustrating existences right to the final blackout when the lack of resolution tidily reflects how often lives like these (all lives?) remain unresolved.
In an unusual request at the time, Delaney included three jazz musicians. Pendleton follows suit with guitarist-musical director Phil Faconti, trumpeter Max Boiko (whose mute is always attached) and bassist (Walter Stinson). They give tasty versions of songs which, like "Everybody Loves My Baby," are often meant as comments on the action. The first bars heard, as an overture, are the melody to "A Taste of Honey," which didn't exist in 1958 but was composed by Bobby Scott and Ric Marlow for the 1960 Broadway transfer and was popularized by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass to the tune of four Grammies.
But Faconti, Boiko and Marlow aren't present merely to send cool-hot licks into the air. Pendleton sees that they figure prominently. For a good part of the time, Faconti and Boiko sit alongside the actors on the shabby, just off-center sofa, and Stinson stands by it. As they keep an eye on the action, the director has a few other sight gags ready.
Wearing period costumes impeccably supplied by Barbara A. Bell and under lighting by Eric Southern that features an unshaded light bulb to accent the squalor, the cast is distinguiished to a woman and man. Brockman's Jo is like a tense violin string. Aside from appearing in last season's strong Burial at Thebes, she's new and worth getting to know. Were she next announced to be Joan of Arc in a revival of Jean Anouilh's The Lark, it might not be too surprising.
Botchan, in a red wig and well-displayed cleavage may be giving her best performance yet as a longtime Pearl player. As Helen, she negotiates a fine line between irritating mom and sympathetic, gobsmacked new bride. Cover is flawless as the uncouth Peter, and Reese avoids every cliché of the good-pal nancy boy. In his one scene, Otukoya dispenses the kind of charm that not only takes Jo in but the audience as well.
A word about Harry Feiner's set: The living room/bedroom/glimpse of kitchen couldn't be better. What's behind it is even more remarkable. It's a scrim on which, presumably looking south from the abode and over a gas factory, are painted what appear to be the rooftops of several hundred buildings like the one Jo and Helen inhabit. The program credits Tom Hooper Seaman and Sven Nelson as scenic artists, but whoever designed (Feiner presumably) and executed the backdrop deserves a grand nod for helping add to the play's inherent gloom.
A Taste of Honey was a revelation when it bowed and continues to be thoroughly of the moment today.