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What's Playing in New York

The Gentleman Dancing Master
at The Pearl Theatre

by Kelly Monaghan

Restoration playwright William Wycherley is best known, to the extent he is known at all, for The Country Wife, a bawdy comedy about a predatory rake in a hypocritical society not too unlike our own.

Now The Pearl Theatre Company, which (if you'll excuse the phrase) mounted The Country Wife a few years back, is doing us all the tremendous favor of offering the New York premiere (yes, you heard that right) of Wycherley's 1671 comedy, The Gentleman Dancing Master.

Although less successful than Wycherley's best work, Dancing Master is a fun little sex romp replete with double entendre but no actual sex that offers its own distinct pleasures.

The heart of the play is the rebellion of Hippolyta (Marsha Stephanie Blake), a 14-year-old wise beyond her years, against the cloistering forced on her by her strict Catholic father (Dan Daily). With her maid and the unwitting aid of her doltish and foppish fiancé (Sean McNall) , a cousin chosen by her father, she plots to sample the wider world in the person of a dashing young gentleman of the town.

Hippolyta gets her wish when, somewhat against his better judgment, Mr. Gerrard (nicely played by Bradford Cover) is lured to her bed chamber and it's love at first sight for both. Discovered in near flagrante, she has the presence of mind to introduce her newly minted lover as the harmless dancing master of the title.

Around this plot, Wycherley weaves a satire of contemporary manners and mannerisms. The fiancé has adopted the style of fashionable Paris, complete with pink pantaloons, gaudy cravats, and a phony French accent. The father is a merchant long absent in Spain who returns with all the cozy affectations and warmth of the Spanish Inquisition, complete with a severe black suit and a Castilian lisp.

All this may strike contemporary audiences as somewhat remote, although presumably Wycherley's targets were instantly recognizable to his opening night crowd. The nearest modern parallel I could think of is the affectation of pampered suburban white kids dressing and talking like inner city gangsta rappers. Still, we get the joke, especially since much of the humor in the play comes from the clash of styles between father and son-in-law-to-be.

What does not seem at all remote to us is Hippolita's post-feminist insistence on taking control of her own destiny. Wycherley, tellingly, gave her the name of the queen of the Amazons. The foreordained happy ending is delayed by her insistence on putting her beau to the test to see if he values her for herself or merely for the fortune that will be his once they marry.

One of the great joys of Restoration comedy is the way in which it tends to illustrate the old saw that the more things change the more they stay the same, and this production doesn't disappoint. When Hippolita learns that her beau plans to whisk her away in a coach and four she is ecstatic, proving that teenage girls have always been suckers for the guy with the coolest set of wheels. And a scene in which a whore negotiates a sort of pre-nup with a well-heeled gent could have been written yesterday.

The Pearl is giving the play a very good, if not perfect, production. Marsha Stephanie Blake is just terrific as the headstrong Hippolita and the ever-reliable Dan Daily earns every laugh as the preposterous father who prefers to be known as Don Diego. Director Gus Kaikkonen has guided his very American cast to an economical sense of period style and engineered some suitably hilarious stage antics to highlight the farce. Superb swordsmanship, however, is perhaps too much to ask.

Another nice touch is the sung interludes in which two "ladies" of the town comment on the action and Heather Girardi and Rachel Botchan make perfectly delightful strumpets.

The only serious misstep is the portrayal of the foppish Monsieur de Paris (Sean McNall), for which I fault the director and costume designer. McNall gives every indication of being a very good actor when, late in the play, the plot frees him from the overwrought portrayal of the Frenchified fop. He gets the goofyness of the character just right, but I couldn’t help thinking he was pushed too far in other directions. Suffice it to say that pink wigs were not period and add nothing.

That's a minor quibble, however, when there is so much else to celebrate in this production, not least of which is the chance to see this rarely produced farce. You might have to wait decades for your next shot at it.

The Gentleman Dancing Master plays at The Pearl Theatre, 80 St. Marks Place, in the East Village, through December 18, 2005.

Tickets are $40 - $50. For more information:
Box office: 212-598-9802
www.pearltheatre.org

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What's Playing in New York

The Gentleman Dancing Master at The Pearl Theatre

by Kelly Monaghan

The Gentleman Dancing Master
at The Pearl Theatre