Ooooh, what an opportunity for critical cruelty --- the rich kids’ school acting out a 1939 satire about the meanest of the savage meanies who sat around the Algonquin Round Table!
This Depression-era circle of critics and satirists, which included New York Times drama critic Alexander Woolcott, writers Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley, comedian Harpo Marx, New Yorker founder Harold Ross, playwrights George S. Kaufman, Robert Sherwood, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber and Noel Coward, journalists Heywood Broun, Ruth Hale and Franklin Pierce Adams and actress Tallulah Bankhead, hung out at Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel and honed the insult to a fine art form.
Unfortunately, a succeeding generation of critics superficially modeled themselves after these acidic wits, generally without the deep cultural backgrounds from whence the originals’ barbs emerged. By the time I moved from the old Canal Zone to one of the snottier suburbs of Detroit in 1966, I found an even later generation who had learned about insults from the shoddy imitations, mean-spirited kids who went around bragging about how they’d really cut someone down. Sometimes it was about things like calling the black woman who drove the school bus a jungle bunny. But if you look at whom the folks who sat around the Algonquin Round Table sent up, and sorted out the mere subjects of outrageous jests from the targets of their genuine wrath --- bearing in mind the turbulent times in which they worked --- you’d realize that the would-be put-down artists in the Bloomfield Hills secondary schools of the mid-60s had very little in common with the brilliant critics of three decades before.
The folks around the Algonquin Round Table skewered the high and mighty. They weren’t about snobbery. They almost always picked on people their own size or bigger, and the exceptions were invariably those with ridiculous pretensions to greatness. This esteemed circle of critics savaged Broadway and Hollywood, but not high school plays.
I came later, after President Truman, the House Un-American Activities Committee, Senator McCarthy, Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan and a host of lesser authority figures had set upon the American cultural scene and left mostly mediocrities standing; after television and suburbs architecturally designed to isolate people from their neighbors had replaced community life; after American cultural criticism had been reduced to the pointless hollow insult.
I couldn’t relate. I let my hair grow, dropped out and gradually discovered a new generation of social and cultural critics, people who were occasionally just as savage as the crowd at the Algonquin Hotel, but who had the substance that the intervening generations of critics lacked. You want examples? Read Harlan Ellison’s “The Glass Teat” television criticism anthologies if you can find a copy of one of them. Check out Lenny Bruce’s “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People.” Compare the movie criticism of Siskel and Ebert to that of their predecessors in the late 50s and early 60s.
But I digress. This is a review about a high school play, by someone whose style is to ignore rather than insult the banal and otherwise unworthy. And this was a pretty good high school production of a pretty funny play.
Yes, we got the over-acting that’s typical of youngsters and the norm in the Latin American telenovelas from which many of these kids will have received their notions of what acting is about. Yes, much of the cast was acting in a second language, and all of them were portraying a time, place and social milieu outside of their experience.
But they played it well. They remembered their lines. There were very few stumbles by the large cast during the relatively long three-act play. This, even though their director Jerry Duggan was called away at the last moment for a birth in the family and the assistant director Mary Richards had to step in. Although I'm not going to mention everyone who appeared onstage or worked behind the scenes in this review, everyone involved deserves a hand for a job well done.
“The Man Who Came to Dinner” is a thinly-veiled satire by one member of the Algonquin Round Table, George S. Kaufman (in collaboration with Moss Hart), about the central figure of that circle, Alexander Woolcott. Alberto Mann ably enough played the irascible and decadent Sheridan Whiteside, the character based upon Woolcott.
"A hick town is one in which there is no place to go that you shouldn't be," Woolcott said, and in the play Whiteside has accepted a dinner invitation in such a place and fallen on an icy porch. Now temporarily confined to a wheelchair, he proceeds to take over his hosts' home in a most obnoxious way.
Mann’s role was clearly that of the leading man. Beyond that, we could reasonably argue about whether the “lead actor - leading actress - supporting actor(s) - supporting actress(es)" formula quite fits this opus. The International School of Panama’s production shone brightest, however, in the subsidiary roles. If there was a leading lady it was Alexandra Giraudon, who played Whiteside’s long-suffering secretary very well. Cristina Chewning very ably played her foil, a grasping, promiscuous and somewhat dense starlet. The prize in the two young ladies’ rivalry, a handsome and bright but manipulable small town newspaperman, was played to near-perfection by Patrick Casal.
For this reviewer, however, the night’s best performances were in bit parts. Darrel Holnes's portrayal of an actor who conspires with Alexandra Giraudon’s character to make a fool of Cristina Chewning’s was a few cuts above all the others. Michael Smith’s campy version of a character based upon Harpo Marx also deserves special mention.
This play took place at the Theatre Guild of Ancon’s little wooden headquarters and was another example of the close ties between the International School and the Guild, a relationship that has kept English-language theater alive during difficult times in Panama. No doubt a number of the people who appeared in "The Man Who Came to Dinner" will be seen again in Theatre Guild productions to come.
