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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for June 17, 2011

TT: Welcome back, Rachel Crothers

June 17, 2011 by ldemanski

I have much wholehearted praise for the Mint Theater Company’s revival of Rachel Crothers’ A Little Journey. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
The Mint Theater Company, one of New York’s most admired Off-Broadway troupes, specializes in neglected plays that have slipped through the cracks. More often than not it comes up with gems, among the most notable of which was Rachel Crothers’ “Susan and God,” first seen in 1937 and revived by the Mint to impressive effect in 2006. Now the company has gone back to the same well with an equally strong staging of another Crothers play, “A Little Journey,” which hasn’t been performed professionally in New York since it closed on Broadway in 1919–and guess what? It’s just as good.
Crothers, America’s most successful woman playwright, is all but unknown today. Born in 1878, she wrote some 30-odd plays that made it to Broadway prior to her death in 1958, most of which she also directed and many of which, like “A Little Journey” and “Susan and God,” were hits that were later filmed. How could so distinguished a female artist have vanished into the memory hole? You’d think that literary-minded feminists would have been her most outspoken champions. But Crothers, like Lillian Hellman, was a commercial playwright who specialized in “well-made” plays, a genre that became unfashionable after Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller trashed the theatrical rulebook, and the fact that she’d been so popular in her lifetime worked against her posthumously. Not until the Mint exhumed “Susan and God” did it occur to anyone that her body of work deserved a second look.
ALMINT.jpgAll of which brings us to “A Little Journey,” an unusually well-crafted play about a group of strangers of widely varied backgrounds who get to know one another while traveling by train from Grand Central Station to the West Coast. You’re heard that one before, right? In fact, it’s one of the best-known of storytelling tricks, but “A Little Journey” predates Vicki Baum’s “Grand Hotel” by a decade, and Crothers may actually have invented the device herself. More importantly, she uses it with great freshness, tucking a surprise into the last act that will make you jump….
The Mint long ago mastered the magical art of cramming big shows onto its shoebox-sized stage without breaking anything. Roger Hanna’s set for “A Little Journey,” for instance, turns Crothers’ sleeper car into a simple but handsome-looking revolving carousel, a sleight-of-hand trick that gives the production a feeling of forward movement unrivaled by infinitely more complicated (and expensive) Pullman-car sets….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

June 17, 2011 by ldemanski

“It seemed to him there was never much time with women. Before you could look at one twice, you were into an argument, and they were telling you what was going to happen.”
Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

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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