February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Joseph Hurley
THE TORCH-BEARERS, by George Kelly. Directed by Dylan Baker. Featuring Marian Seldes and Faith Prince. The Drama Department at Greenwich House, 27 Barrow St., NYC. Through March 4.
In 1974, when playwright George Kelly died at age 87, he was mainly remembered because he was actress Grace Kelly’s uncle, and, perhaps, because he had been awarded the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for a somber domestic drama, "Craig’s Wife."
Another all but forgotten Kelly play, "The Torch-Bearers," is a farce from the 1922 Broadway season. It is produced only rarely, and usually in summer stock, because it is about a group of amateur actors putting on a play as a charity event in a Philadelphia suburb.
The estimable forces behind the group of mainly young actors, directors and playwrights who call themselves the Drama Department, have added Kelly’s addled farce, a dizzying and starry production directed by Dylan Baker, to the list of American works on which they have thrown fresh and revivifying light, the first of which was Tennessee Williams "The Kingdom of Earth."
Though the Drama Department doesn’t specify, it’s fairly safe to assume that the comfortable Ritter household, where the play’s first and third acts take place, is located in one of the cushy towns along the Philadelphia Main Line, since that’s the world Kelly knew best.
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The ladies and gentlemen of the neighborhood are putting on a play, as they have done in the past, and again it’s a benefit, this time to aid the city’s Seaman’s Institute. As before, the community’s drama queen, Mrs. J. Duro Pampinelli, a veritable vestal virgin at the temple of tragedy, is in charge.
Things were going swimmingly until the unseen husband of the leading lady suddenly died, requiring his wife to leave the production, since the funeral was scheduled for the same day as the performance. What could Madame Pampinelli, better known as Betty, do except rush featherbrained Paula Ritter, more comfortable in the role of punch-passing hostess, into the breach?
That’s the set up, and it fills the first act with the writer’s compassionate but somewhat acidic observations on the silly suburbanites he had plenty of opportunity to study in the course of his life as a privileged Philadelphian. "The Torch-Bearers" is, as it happens, based in fact.
Kelly’s play has an efficient first act, a stupendously funny second, and then, a final segment that dribbles toward a weak excuse for a final curtain.
But why quibble when director Baker’s loose-limbed production is a laugh-loaded joy from start to finish? First and foremost there are the redoubtable Marian Seldes as the theater gorgon, Betty Pampinelli, and the delectable Faith Prince as Paula Ritter.
Seldes could have got away with murder playing a stagy dilettante who values the theater over everything, a woman for whom "the birdwing gesture is the only gesture." Instead, although she reaps her share of laughs, the actress invests Pampinelli with a goodly measure of restraint, with the result that she is frequently very touching and always fairly reasonable in her desperation. You may find yourself thinking "she’s right, you know," at one or two points in the evening.
Prince, in a flaming red wig, is a creature straight from the pastry tray, particularly when, as happens a couple of times in the course of the action, just a touch of her Tony-winning Adelaide in the "Guys and Dolls" revival of a few seasons ago sneaks into her Philly housewife.
Both actresses look terrific in the costumes provided by Jonathan Bixby and Gregory A. Gale, particularly Seldes’s Act I stunner, the sketch for which has become the production’s advertising logo and the illustration for the show’s program.
Baker’s 12-actor cast is both strong and delightful from start to finish, with special mention going to David Garrison as Paula’s tolerant husband, Joan Copeland as the easily distracted, much-married prompter, Nelly Fell, Judith Blazer as Florence McCrickett, the ingenue in the play the group is doing, and Albert Macklin as the nervous wreck of a prop man who arrives as part of the Pampinelli package.
Kelly’s glorious second act is a creature of missed cues, collapsing scenery, muffed entrances, forgotten lines, dropped props and physical collisions, all of them executed with wit and brio by the splendid company the Drama Department in order to breathe new life into the reputation of George Kelly, a writer who deserves a brighter place in the history of the modern American popular theater than the one in which he has been languishing for much too long a time.