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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for May 11, 2010

TT: Get to know your inner hypochondriac

May 11, 2010 by Terry Teachout

In the New York section of today’s Wall Street Journal, I review a highly satisfactory off-Broadway show, the Mint Theater Company’s revival of Doctor Knock, or The Triumph of Medicine. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
On Broadway, you play it safe or lose your shirt. If you want to revive a straight play, you pick something very, very familiar and cast a movie star as your lead. Otherwise, disaster beckons. All the more reason, then, to praise the tiny Off-Broadway troupes that specialize in performing forgotten but eminently stageworthy plays of the past. At the top of the list is the Mint Theater Company, whose dagger-sharp revivals of Rachel Crothers’ “Susan and God,” John Galsworthy’s “The Skin Game” and Harley Granville-Barker’s “The Madras House” rank high on my list of memorable nights on the aisle.
Even for so daring a company, the Mint’s latest venture would seem to be a stretch. If you’ve heard of “Doctor Knock, or The Triumph of Medicine,” you probably come from France, where Jules Romain’s most successful play is known to all educated citoyens, or England, where it’s been telecast twice by the BBC and revived on numerous occasions, most recently in 1994. In America, by contrast, the play is unknown save to especially well-informed specialists. Yet “Doctor Knock,” written in 1923, is a knockout, a saber-toothed satire of the medical profession that could scarcely be more timely now that health-care reform is No. 1 with a hashtag on the list of hot political topics….
The thing that sets Dr. Knock (Thomas M. Hammond) apart from his benighted colleagues is that he sees medicine less as an art than a business, one in which anyone who grasps the principles of modern marketing can make (so to speak) a killing. To this end he opens a free clinic, the purpose of which is to alert his new patients to the fact that they all appear to be suffering from hitherto unsuspected illnesses. (His slogan is “The healthy are merely closet invalids.”) The good people of St. Maurice have previously managed to squeak by on home remedies, but his methods are so effective that within three months the town hotel has been turned into an annex to his clinic and the bellboy is inserting thermometers into the hindquarters of dozens of happy hypochondriacs each day….
I’m not even slightly surprised to report that the Mint is performing “Doctor Knock” with consummate savoir-faire. Gus Kaikkonen, who runs New Hampshire’s Peterborough Players and previously directed “The Madras House” for the Mint, has polished the script (which is being performed in his own idiomatic translation) until it gleams like a dueling saber, and Mr. Hammond’s urbane performance is frighteningly believable….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

May 11, 2010 by Terry Teachout

“There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.”
Anton Chekhov, “The Teacher of Literature”

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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