A Taste of Honey
Playwright: Shelagh Delaney
At: Shattered Globe Theatre Company at the
Greenhouse, 2257 N. Lincoln
Phone: 773-871-7000; $27-$35
Runs through: July 5
We are in a shabby thrice-subdivided furnished apartment on the upper floor of a building flanked by a noisy gasworks, a smelly slaughterhouse, a chilly fog-enshrouded river, and—the supreme irony—a church with a cemetery. Our newly-arrived tenants are a gin-swilling matron and her sullen teenage daughter, their suitcases bespeaking a chronically transient lifestyle initiated years earlier by Helen's husband deserting both her and her infant child. At present, the abandoned mother is being pursued by a churlish suitor, and Jo is planning to leave school and find a job, little suspecting that she will soon be living on welfare in preparation for having a baby. Oh, did I mention that this is England, and it's 1958?
Eighteen-year-old Shelagh Delaney's play premiered only two years after John Osborne's Look Back In Anger launched the literary movement toward drama featuring working-class heroes embodied by the 'angry young man', or, in this case, woman. Female misanthropy being expressed less through violence than through lassitude, these two generations of single mothers illustrate the cycle of poverty engendered by ignorance, bigotry and despair. In this aspect, the slums of Manchester are little different from those throughout the world: true, oral contraceptives had not yet been invented, but a more self-assertive girl than Jo could have found means to avoid becoming pregnant by a navy medic finishing his National Service. Before someone can improve their lot, however, they must first believe that it CAN be improved—as Jo's sailor is doing, as well as the art student who appoints himself her caretaker—and in that, says Delaney, lies the obstacle to Helen and Jo's progress.
It would be easy to caricature personalities so ( we hope ) alien to our experience, the better to assure us of our superiority to these hopeless wretches. But even if Shattered Globe Theatre's audiences were prepared to tolerate company member Linda Reiter playing an irrevocably unsympathetic character, director Jeremy Wechsler has never opted to take the cheap route. Under his instruction, each cast member—Helen Sadler as the ambivalent Jo, Kevin Viol as the nurturing Geoff ( who is probably, but not obviously, gay ) , Bryson Engelen as the affectionate seaman Jimmie, Jeremy Van Meter as the repellent Peter and the aforementioned Reiter as the destructive Mama Helen—conveys the viewpoint of their individual character with unflinching conviction, leaving us to provide our own giggles and grimaces.
