Theatre in Review: Mary Broome (Mint Theater Company)

	Janie Brookshire, Roderick Hill, Kristin Griffith. Photo: Carol Rosegg

The servant problem couldn't be more acute in Mary Broome, Allan Monkhouse's surprisingly ambiguous comedy of class and sex. It is 1912, and the members of the upper-middle-class Timbrell family are busy preparing for a wedding. The festivities are halted by the news that Leonard, the ne'er-do-well second son, has impregnated Mary, the parlor maid. Leonard, a kind of writer manqué, has learned to live with his relatives' low expectations; as his brother, Edgar, smugly notes, their father pays Leonard to keep out of the family business. (Leonard is said to be a writer, but there is little evidence that he actually writes anything.) Even so, the Timbrells are agog to discover that their problem child has no intention of taking any sort of responsibility for his act. In the course of an intricate family dispute, however, he ends up affianced to Mary, aided by an allowance of 300 pounds a year.

Much more happens in Mary Broome, none of it good; Mary's dilemma lies beyond the Timbrells' clumsy good intentions, and her marriage to Leonard, which begins on an awkward footing from which it never recovers, sends them sliding down the social scale, climaxing in a tragedy that severely challenges the play's classification as a comedy. Monkhouse (1858-1936), one of the Manchester school of cold-eyed naturalists, records the results of the Timbrells' social experiment with the air of a clinician gathering data. He certainly wastes no time in getting down to business; in an era when it was customary for audiences to endure 20 minutes of watching the servants dust while delivering big chunks of exposition, Monkhouse reveals Mary's secret in a matter of minutes, opening negotiations between her and the Timbrells in a remarkably brisk manner.

He might have dawdled a bit more over the details of his story. For a prosperous, if non-titled, family such as the Timbrells, the marriage of Leonard and Mary would be a misalliance, a source of endless scandal and distress; these facts are barely sketched in during a scene in which Leonard and Mary arrive for dinner embarrassingly overdressed (why doesn't he know better?) and are made to take part in awkward conversation with a pair of guests. Mary is an impeccably mannered and nicely spoken young lady, but, as written, she is so passive that she barely qualifies as the heroine of the play that bears her name. It's even harder to know what to make of Leonard, a character who seems to change his mind with every line. I'm guessing that we're supposed to see him as a charming rotter, but, if so, Monkhouse stinted on the charming part, and Leonard's fecklessness and self-absorption become increasingly irritating. Neither character comes into focus, leaving us left with a marriage of ciphers at the play's center.

This is probably why the two leads in Jonathan Banks' otherwise polished production struggle with their roles. Janie Brookshire's Mary is appealing, her self-possession inextricably linked to an awareness that she is not in charge of her fate, but she also seems oddly detached from the misfortunes that befall her. Roderick Hill's Leonard is, similarly, a pale, passionless creature, blithely rising above the mess he has made with an army of flippant remarks. It's hard to imagine how the two of them ever got into a compromising situation. As Edward, Leonard's outraged father, Graeme Malcolm supplies some sorely needed moral and emotional engagement. The role of Edward's wife is rather confusingly conceived -- the script hints at all sorts of emotional complexities and possible indiscretions, then drops them altogether -- but Kristin Griffith does her best to make something of it. Patricia Kilgarriff has a nice bit as a nosy, if ultimately sympathetic, landlady.

Roger Hanna's set -- a drawing room filled with portraits of the Timbrells' ancestors, which are turned around, showing their backs, when the action moves to Leonard and Mary's tiny flat -- seems designed for a more overtly comic play than the one we are seeing. Martha Hally's costumes are filled with lovely period details; they sharply delineate the class differences among the characters. Nicole Pearce's lighting and Jane Shaw's sound design are perfectly fine.

As opposed to some of the Mint's recent dramatic finds, however, Mary Broome is an oddly skittish affair, occupying as it does an uncertain middle ground between satire, domestic comedy, and serious social criticism. It's mildly amusing but surprisingly lacking a sting.--David Barbour