The Suitcase Under the Bed

Playwright Teresa Deevy lived from 1894 to 1963. The youngest of 13 children, she lost her hearing in her late teens, roughly at the same time that her family's financial situation became much reduced. She used theatre as as a way to practice her lip-reading (she read the play first, when possible) and soon felt inspired to write plays herself. When she had trouble getting her work produced, she switched to writing radio plays. She went to mass every day, yet was critical of the restrictions placed on women by the Catholic church. The limited biographical information available does not mention any romance.

She must have been a fabulous lip-reader and an even better reader of people, as her plays are wise, subtle, and full of psychological insight.

Mace and Deaver in The King of Spain's Daughter
Photo: Richard Termine

If not for Jonathan Bank and the invaluable Mint, Deevy and her work might be unknown, which would be a big loss for audiences and theatre history. Bank has not only revived Deevy's work; he has also been instrumental in tracking down copies of lost plays. Bank's latest evening of Deevy's work, The Suitcase Under the Bed, features four one-acts that were found in the titular location.

Yours Unfaithfully

So much depends on where you begin a play. Do you start when character A is behaving well? Or when character B is? Do you start at the foundation of their relationship or in media res? In Yours Faithfully, written in 1933 but currently getting its world premiere at the invaluable Mint Theater Company, playwright Miles Malleson starts a little too in media res for my taste.

Max von Essen; Elisabeth Gray
(photo: Richard Termine)

[spoilers follow] 

Anne and Stephen have been together for eight years. Many of their friends consider them an amazing couple. In fact, their compatibility has been rated at 80%, when most couples are rated at 20%. But there is trouble in the 80% paradise, or at least a sense of unease. Stephen has lost his joie de vivre and succumbed to writer's block. Anne is happily busy with the school she runs and their children (never seen), and she suspects that Stephen needs a new muse/lover. She chooses their friend Diana, who is just coming out of mourning her husband. Stephen and Diana eagerly accept Anne's generosity, and soon Stephen is happy and writing again--and perhaps more in love with Anne than ever, due to his new freedom. Just one problem: no matter how much Anne tells herself that jealousy is beneath her, she cannot help what she feels: terribly, terribly, terribly jealous.

The New Morality

Harold Chapin's The New Morality, the slight but delightful piece from 1915 currently on view at The Mint, resembles an Oscar Wilde play if Wilde wrote about (almost) real people.

Brenda Meaney
Photo: Richard Termine

Betty Jones has taken to her bed and refused a meal to perform a level of repentance she doesn't feel. Her crime? She unloaded on Muriel, the woman with whom her husband has been flirting all summer. She acknowledges to her good friend Alice that some of her language would be better left to dog shows, and she admits that she was probably pretty loud. She thanks Alice for visiting at risk to her own reputation.

And then Muriel's husband Wallace shows up, demanding that Betty apologize.

Chapin uses this thin plot as a skeleton for discussions of sexual politics, society, and the meaning of fidelity. He fleshes it out with scores of very funny lines. His take on sexual politics is fascinating, since it exists in a world that probably never was: the gorgeous homes of independently wealthy people, taken care of by servants, where women rule the roost and men fecklessly try to figure them out. Chapin ignores the true power that men have and had, particularly 100 years ago, yet there is a level on which his sense of sexual politics is advanced and even vaguely feminist. (Chapin was killed in World War I, one of the millions of tragic casualties of that stupid and useless war, so there's no way of knowing how his work would have developed.)