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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

A masterpiece reclaimed

August 26, 2016 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Mint Theater Company’s off-Broadway revival of N.C. Hunter’s A Day by the Sea. Here’s an excerpt.

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No drama troupe in America has carved out a more distinctive niche for itself than the Mint Theater Company. According to its mission statement, the Mint “finds and produces worthwhile plays from the past that have been lost or forgotten.” These bland-sounding words disguise a refreshing originality of taste on the part of Jonathan Bank, the company’s artistic director. Since I started reviewing the Mint a decade ago, it’s presented, among many other memorable shows, Rachel Crothers’ “Susan and God,” Harley Granville-Barker’s “The Madras House,” John Galsworthy’s “The Skin Game,” N.C. Hunter’s “A Picture of Autumn,” George Kelly’s “The Fatal Weakness,” Jules Romains’ “Doctor Knock” and John Van Druten’s “London Wall.” All of these plays were essentially unknown to contemporary American audiences before the Mint revived them, and all received superlative small-scale off-Broadway stagings that made convincing cases for their excellence. What other drama company, here or abroad, can make the same claim for its revivals?

Photo:   A Day By the Sea  By N.C. Hunter Directed By Austin Pendleton; presented by The Mint Theater Cast; Curzon Dobell; Julian Elfer; Katie Firth; Philip Goodwin; Sean Gormley; Polly McKie Kylie McVey; George Morfogen; ?Athan Sporek?; Jill Tanner Dress rehearsal photographed: Thursday, July 21, 2016; 4:30 PM at The Beckett Theatre at Theatre Row 410 West 42nd Street; NYC; Photograph: © 2016 Richard Termine  PHOTO CREDIT - Richard TermineNow, though, the Mint has outdone itself with its latest effort, N.C. Hunter’s “A Day by the Sea,” for me the finest of the noteworthy plays that Mr. Bank has exhumed to date. It is, in fact, that rarest of rarities, a forgotten masterpiece, acted by the best ensemble cast I’ve seen in recent seasons and staged with taut vitality by Austin Pendleton. First performed in London in 1953, “A Day by the Sea” has only been staged once in New York, in 1955. Yet it’s so good as to make you wonder how Hunter, who died in 1971, could have dropped off the map of English-language theater.

The answer, I fear, is that a critic did him dirty. Kenneth Tynan, who in the Fifties was England’s most influential drama reviewer, attacked “A Day by the Sea” as “an evening of unexampled triviality…Mr. Hunter’s pseudo-Chekhov is about as close to the real thing as an aspidistra to a woodland fern.” Tynan favored the Angry Young Men of the British stage and had little use for plays without a political message, and “A Day by the Sea,” a quiet character study written in the manner of Anton Chekhov, Hunter’s avowed master, was just the sort of show that he longed to push out of London’s West End. Even though the play’s original production, which starred John Gielgud (who doubled as director) and Ralph Richardson, had a long run, Hunter’s reputation never recovered from Tynan’s slating.

To see “A Day by the Sea” at long last is to realize how absurdly wrong Tynan was. A portrait of a priggish, frustrated diplomat (Julian Elfer) and a widowed mother (Katie Firth) who have reached the near shore of middle age and wonder whether life has more to offer than they’ve had so far, it’s trivial only if you think the lives of ordinary middle-class people are trivial….

Ms. Firth, a familiar face to fans of the Mint, and Mr. Elfer, who is new to me, are as good as they could possibly be, though no more so than the eight other members of the cast, all of whom give vividly drawn performances. As for Mr. Pendleton, he knows that the trick to making a play like “A Day by the Sea” work is to winkle out the laughs and let the pathos take care of itself…

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Read the whole thing here.

A video clip from the dress rehearsal of A Day by the Sea:

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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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