By: Peter Shaffer
At: Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave.,
Phone: ( 773 ) 753-4472; $25 -$50
Runs through: June 11
BY CATEY SULLIVAN
What does one do when life is dreary, gray and numbingly pedestrian? Enlarge, enliven and enlighten, of course. Romance on short notice—the ability to create lush, curlicued flourishes in a world of dull straight angles—is a sanity-saving gift.
In Lettice and Lovage, Peter Shaffer plunges into the richly embellished world of Lettice Douffet, a tour guide in the historic Fustian House, a place she describes as 'the most boring house' in all of England. The gospel according to Lettice is that without great, galloping swooshes of melodrama, life becomes a graveyard for monochromatic ghosts.
As Shaffer did to much darker effect with Equus, he uses Lettice and Lovage to contrast dangerously teeming creativity and borderline madness with rigid-as-a-straightjacket conformity and uncompromising normalcy. The latter we must adopt to survive in the world as we know it. The former? Such stuff as dreams are made of.
In Court Theatre's droll, wise and perfectly rounded production, what becomes vitally clear is that weekends burgeoning with richly costumed, elaborately staged mock executions are an ideal antidote to the sensible shoes and buttoned-up suits of the weekdays. In other words, if you're relentlessly normal 24/7, you're doomed.
Director Lucy Smith Conroy guides an excellent cast with exquisite timing through a sure-fire audience pleaser. There's enough poignancy in Lettice and Lovage to keep sentimentalists happy, and enough twisted humor to make cynics buy in, too. The production marks an emphatic exclamation point to the close of one of Court's strongest seasons in recent memory.
Patricia Hodges plays Lettice, a woman whose fringed and flowing tunics evoke the graceful drama of a swooping heron. Her opening scenes here are succulent plums, each riper and more purple than the previous. Hodges doesn't just go over the top with Lettice's discourses on banquets of boiled hedgehogs and tragically crippled heiresses shut up in the parapets—she soars right off edge of the cliff. It's a wickedly amusing tour de force, and the fact that Hodges can over-emote with authenticity and without turning into a canned ham speaks to her prowess as an actor.
She's contrasted marvelously by Linda Reiter as Lotte Schoen, a museum bureaucrat who is as colorless and humorless as wet cardboard. If Lettice's influence bring change to Lotte's life, you'd be right.
That part of Shaffer's play is predictable, but it's far from simple. As are we all, Lotte and Lettice are walking intricately knotted tightropes over tragedy and comedy in their lives, and it's always painfully clear just how easy it would be to slip into dark everlasting.
Reiter and Hodges are backed by a superb supporting cast, particularly Linda Gillum playing totally against type as a mouse-meek, stoop-shouldered secretary, and John Judd as a no-nonsense lawyer who discovers he has a true gift for playing air drums.