Playwright: W. Somerset Maugham
At: Griffin Theatre at Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 W. Belmont
Phone: 773-327-5252; $15-$24
Runs through: June 24
Yesterday's contemporary plays are today's period pieces. They not only require sets and costumes in keeping with the 1890s or 1920s or 1950s—or whatever the time slot—but they also require a director and actors who can render believable the slang, locutions and standards of behavior of another time. Yet a period piece—as distinguished from an out-and-out costume drama ( Shakespeare ) —is essentially modern in form and language. The best period pieces have an essential truth we can recognize as our own, so the work speaks to us beyond its period trappings.
Since Euripides wrote Medea in 431 B.C., playwrights have addressed women's responses to men's marital infidelities. Beginning with Ibsen in the 1880s, authors also began to address the economic basis of matrimony, proposing that marriage was legal prostitution derived from the economic enslavement of women. An unlikely string of British playwrights—Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw among them—embraced these ideas in light dramas and comedies of manners.
By 1926, when The Constant Wife was produced, the subject matter wasn't new. What Somerset Maugham added in his otherwise old-fashioned drawing-room comedy is the notion that sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose. It's common for the wronged wife to pretend to have an affair to rekindle—through jealousy—her husband's ardor. Maugham has none of that. His heroine, Constance Middleton—the content and secure wife of an upper middle-class surgeon—is perfectly agreeable to her husband's affairs, but insists on having one herself with an attractive but predictable admirer. Constance doesn't do it behind her husband's back, nor does she wish to end her comfortable marriage. Maugham's twist, in which Constance remains reasonable and respectable, was his cheeky contribution to the genre.
Directed by Griffin company member Paul S. Holmquist, The Constant Wife provides constant joy. The well-matched ensemble is crisp and literate, and take obvious pleasure in the verbal style without being overly arch. They are masters of the accents, politesse and badinage of polite 1920s British society. In short, they create comfortable and believable people, from the martini-dry comedy of Kate Harris as Constance's mother, to the cool allure of Vanessa Greenway as Constance, to the passionate stiff-upper-lip yobbery of Rom Barhordar as Constance's would-be lover.
The production disappoints only in design elements, and then only partially so. Period-accurate furniture and clothing are difficult to find or expensive to recreate. Griffin does better than most. The scenic design by Joe Schermoly takes a good stylistic shot but makes do with a mix of middleclass 1920s-1940s furniture. The costumes by Elizabeth Schroeder are most effective for the women—true 1920s period or close to it—but completely fail the men, from the cut of their suits to the collars of their shirts.