Coming up ‘Roses’

The members of the Pulitzer Prize committee aren’t compelled to give an award for drama every year. In a thin season, they’re free to give the category a pass, and, over the course of the last several decades, they’ve elected that particular option on several occasions.
When a play gets the nod, it’s generally difficult to remember the name of the winner four or five years later.
A notable exception is Frank D. Gilroy’s “The Subject Was Roses,” which won the Pulitzer Prize forty years ago, and revived frequently over the years, still has the power to hold an audience firmly in its grip, start to finish.
The point has seldom been made more powerfully that in the new production at the appealing little barn theater, the Penguin Rep, in the Rockland County town of Stony Point, just an hour’s drive from Manhattan.
The Penguin staging, which will run through July 24, has the benefit of specific, clear-headed direction from the group’s artistic director, Joe Brancato, and even more crucial, a beautifully balanced three-actor cast made up of veterans Deborah Hedwall and Michael Cullen, joined by an enormously gifted newcomer, Tom Pelphrey.
“The Subject Was Roses” is, as the late critic Walter Kerr often wrote, what most really worthwhile plays are, namely a family play, conforming to a tradition which, having started with the Greeks, moved down through time to embrace Shakespeare and Shaw, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and others yet unborn.
Gilroy’s materials are deceptively modest, with just three characters, hard-pressed middle class businessman John Cleary, his loving but remote and frustrated wife, Antoinette, and their son Timothy, back from military service in World War II, returning to another sort of battleground — namely his family’s modest apartment in the West Bronx in May of 1946.
The author himself returned to civilian life in 1946, “determined to go to college and become a writer,” a goal he fulfilled abundantly and splendidly. The affable Gilroy has never denied that “The Subject Was Roses” is based primarily on his own experiences, knowing that any attempt to distance himself from his play would be fruitless, and, in a way, foolish, since the text rings with undeniable truth from the first word to the last.
To see Gilroy’s play again, particularly after the passage of a reasonable amount of time, and especially in a production as balanced and as solid as the one at the Penguin, is to be reminded of the reasons why “A Subject Was Roses” has become something of an American classic.
A little-known codicil in the Pulitzer rules states that in order to qualify, a work should reflect aspects of American life with accuracy and insight, and this play does so beyond argument.
It would be difficult to overstate the achievements of the Penguin cast. Michael Cullen, who recently brought a near-terrifying intensity to the role of a villainous ex-con in Tracy Letts’ off-Broadway triumph, “Bug,” creates a full-dimensioned Irish-American father, embittered by the blockages in his personal life as a husband and father and in his thwarted working existence as a Manhattan coffee broker.
The hard-edged Cullen never begs for audience sympathy, daring to unfurl the qualities, even and perhaps particularly the negative traits which have made this urban isolate a stranger in his own home and especially in his ashen marriage.
Deborah Hedwall, who, like Cullen, has stared in past Penguin productions, brings imposing strength and endless grace to the role of Antoinette, familiarly known as Nettie, an inherently civilized woman, perhaps overly attached to the family she left when she married John Cleary.
Nettie withdraws too often to suit her husband, to the comfort and solace provided by her widowed mother, her sister, and her sibling’s disabled son, Willis.
In a sense, the success or failure of any production of this particular play rests on the casting of the Clearys’ returning soldier son Timothy. Director Brancato and the Penguin have been particularly fortunate in finding Tom Pelphrey, a graduate of Rutgers University, perhaps familiar to TV watchers for his work in the soap opera, “The Guiding Light,” in which he plays “troubled teen, Jonathan Randall,” to quote the theater’s publicity handout, and for which he was nominated for a 2005 Daytime Emmy Award.
Only weeks ago, Pelphrey did a standout job in support of Keith Reddin and Rosie Perez in David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Crazy Eights,’ which was produced as part of the Ensemble Studio Theater’s celebrated one-act play Marathon.
Pelphrey’s achievement in “The Subject Was Roses” rests, at least in part, in the magical manner in which he seems to combine aspects of both his parents into a wholly unified and coordinated separate self.
Whether he’s roughhousing with his father, giving as good as he gets, or dancing with his mother, this particular Timmy is very clearly the product of John and Nettie, both of whom he understands more fully and more compassionately than either of them could possibly comprehend.
As fine, as subtle and as detailed as the work of Cullen and Hedwall inarguably is, it is Pelphrey, a young actor with an exceedingly bright future, whose multi-leveled performance welds the occupants of that Bronx apartment into an entirely viable family unit.
Brancato’s direction is swiftly paced, but never hurried, and nevertheless bringing the play in a touch of two hours, intermission included.
The work done by the director and his actors is so clear and so specific that it’s an easy matter to imagine, almost see, the offstage activity Gilroy’s characters talk about, Nettie with her mother and her sister, John and Timmy at the baseball game, and so on.
The scenic design by Drew Francis presents a totally plausible environment for the play, wholly right in terms of time and place, highlighted by the right toaster, the right breadbox, the right fridge and it goes without saying, the proper coffee pot.
The costume design by A. Christina Giannini adds greatly to the overall credibility of the entire venture, with particular emphasis on Nettie’s modest, but tasteful, wardrobe.
With another generation of soldiers involved in yet another war, some of them coming home safely and others not, “The Subject Was Roses” can be said to have acquired an additional level of resonance, without a single word having been altered.
Despite its lack of pretension, or perhaps because of it, Frank D. Gilroy’s glowingly truthful play endures as one of the finest American plays within memory, entirely worthy of the fine production it has been given by the admirable Penguin Rep.