The American Legacy
Metropolitan Playhouse
The American Legacy

220 East Fourth Street ~ New York, New York 10009
Office: 212 995 8410 ~ Tickets: 212 995 5302

"One of my favorite downtown theaters" ~ Martin Denton, nytheatre.com
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Reviews - Secret Service
nytheatre.com

Review by Martin Denton • March 7, 2004

Metropolitan Playhouse performs plays from America's past, with results that are always illuminating, though sometimes in unexpected ways.  What I knew about Secret Service, the 1895 melodrama by William Gillette that is currently on Metropolitan's stage, was that it was set during the Civil War and that it was a huge hit, touring for years with Gillette in the central role of dashing undercover Union agent Lewis Dumont.

What I know about Secret Service now, after having seen it, is that this is one of those shadows of our collective past that's difficult to comprehend nowadays.  There's an alarming climactic scene in which Jonas, the elderly Negro caretaker of the Varney household who has been abetting Dumont in his mission against the Confederacy, actually tells his owner's daughter that he'll be her slave for life if only she'll help him engineer Dumont's escape.  Believe me, this announcement sits uneasily on the ears: all the dignity that actor Lee Dobson summons throughout his performance more or less collapses under the irredeemably racist weight of that line.

Elsewhere Secret Service feels just hoary and quaint, recounting Dumont's improbable caper, in which he infiltrates the Confederacy's War Department Telegraph Office to send false reports of troop movements to the front lines and thereby set a trap for the unwary Rebs.  As unlikely as Dumont's mission is the play's devotion to a code of nobility known only in romance novels: Edith Varney, the impetuous daughter of the South to whom the slave Jonas makes his aforementioned request, is head-over-heels for Dumont, all the more so for his adherence to chivalric notions and lost causes that, common sense tells us, would be anathema to a real-life spy.

So this heaving ole melodrama makes but little sense to modern audiences, though history tells us that our forefathers a few generations back, ate this stuff up.  Ah, to be naive and provincial.

Note, by the way, that my objections are not to the play's watchability: Service Service is splendidly sturdy, and though director Anthony P.  Pennino has fudged with the script some (adding some pointed passages from works by Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, among others, to remind us of the ugliness of war and slavery), he's turned in a faithful and entertaining rendition of the piece.  Ruthanne Gereghty as the stalwart Varney matriarch does the most impressive work among a large cast that also includes Metropolitan favorite Andrew Firda as Dumont (whose alias is Colonel Thorne) and Edward Griffin as the play's villain, Benton Arrelsford.  Fine work by designers Leigh Henderson (set), Douglas Filomena (lighting), and Rebecca Lustig (costumes) bolsters Pennino's vision.