Metropolitan Playhouse
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The Henrietta |
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All that glisters... The Gilded Age glitters its brightest, and
Wall Street is minting millionaires. A few years
after Charles Dow created his average, with New York
setting trading volume records, and the latest crash
over a
decade past, speculation
is the in the air like a contagion, and in Bronson
Howard's smash comedy, no one is immune. As the curtain rises, Nicholas (Old Nick)van
Alstyne, the Master of Wall Street, is staking his
very large fortune on a breakout but secret investment
in a conglomerate named the Henrietta. Meanwhile, Old
Nick's daughter Mary has brought home an English
aristocrat, who is keenly interested in betting on a
racehorse that happens to go by the name of ...
Henrietta. And
his feckless if endearing son Bertie is wagering to
win the hand of his beloved, provided he can convince
her that a portrait she finds in his room is not a
love token from the notorious dancer: Henrietta. The only member of the family not entangled
with a Henrietta would be number one son Nicholas Jr….
except he is a scheming cad, who has betrayed his
devoted wife, ruined his mistress, and happens to be
working secretly and feverishly to tear down his
father's investment and bankrupt the entire family.
Subject to three Henrietta's and multiple treacheries,
the van Alstyne household, and then Wall Street, and
soon enough the economy of half the country are turned
upside down and inside out. Six broken hearts, an
untimely death, and a life's savings must all pass by
before true love and dumb luck can save the day. Among the biggest hits of New York's 1887
season, The Henrietta was a comedy both trenchant and
absurd, mixing farce and tragedy in a delightful
collision of styles. It was commissioned for a popular
comic duo of the day, and it is rife with outrageous
characters, tangled love affairs, and essential
confusions that pop the seams of farce. Most fun are
its persistent 'asides', and characters are defined by
their relationship to the often-acknowledged audience. At the same time, the humor is shadowed by a
darkly serious concern for the corrosive influence of
the business norms of the day, and the play is shaped
by deeply affecting confrontations between parents and
children, star-crossed lovers, lucky and unlucky
investors. New Economy As such, The Henrietta captures a changing
world in ways that are awfully prescient. Written
as the industrial economy gave rise to the financial
economy (and agrarian life was already half-forgotten)
the play paints a portrait of an admirable old order,
founded on industry, fraternity, and charity, supplanted by a new order of work obsession,
egoism, and vanity. Old Nick is an exemplar of an
heroic capitalist: rapacious and wealthy speculator,
he sees love and commerce as a grand game, but he is
also a big-hearted father and philanthropist. He is
spoofed like Molière’s miser, but loved as only an
American playwright could. His children are another story. The new
generation possesses either his ambition without his
heart; or his heart without his head. His treacherous
first son’s killer instincts are untempered by any
heart at all, his social-climbing daughter dominates
her titled husband like a "real housewife", and Bertie
is an empty-headed lamb who lacks the spirit or wit to
embrace the vices his inheritance affords him. That one of
these three ends up Nick's successor—the new Master of
Wall Street—is hardly reassuring for the morals and
stability of the new age. In this world, investing is brother to
gambling, love is a business transaction, and men are
reduced to business machines. Notably, modern
technologies—the stock ticker, the telephone, and the
electric light—have made it possible to work ‘round
the clock and at home, and a central focus of the play
is the corruption of the workaholic Nicholas. In the words
of the stern moralist Dr. Wainwright: “furnace-bred
young men of New York are ... mere bundles of nerve,
that burn themselves like the overcharged wires of a
battery.” Not that it’s all doom and gloom, of course.
In the end, whatever its cautions, the play offers a
time honored antidote in the form of a gamble far
more familiar and (hopefully) more healthful: the
gamble of love. Futures In its time, The Henrietta struck both a
funny bone and a nerve. It ran over five seasons in
New York, inspired two films (first with Douglas
Fairbanks and later Buster Keaton), and in the words
of the New York Times, it was "a real comedy of
American life...a keen satire of the foibles and
failings of men and women we see every day, a
trenchant exposition in dramatic form of one of the
greatest evils of our time". Today, the resonances could not be
clearer, while the humor has lost none of its glee.
The play lampoons an enterprise free from government
regulation, through which entire industries could be
created, inflated, and burst at the whim of selfish
gamesmen, and they played like addicts, the divide
between work and home quite erased. And everyone,
young and old, male and female, European and American,
pious and profane, wants a piece of the action.
Substitute real estate for railroads, the derivative
for the margin, the crawl for the ticker, and the
Blackberry for the telephone, and Bronson Howard's
witty and warning satire of a new economy still shines
125 years on. The Henrietta is Metropolitan’s fourth
production in Season 21, a cautionary comic confection
celebrating one more facet of The American Dream.
- Alex Roe
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Bronson
Howard (1842-1908), born in Detroit, made his
first foray in to drama with an adaptation of
an episode from Les Miserables called Fantine,
but it was only after moving to New York and
working for some years as a journalist that he
finally found recognition, from Augustin Daly,
for his dramatic promise. Daly produced
Howard's Saratoga, and there began the career
of a hugely popular and verstile
dramatist. Writing as the conventions of
the day moved from elevated platforms in
uniformally lit halls to more intimate
"picture-frame" stages under electric lights,
he incorporated both conventions of the
past--such as direct "asides" to the
audience--into the sensibilities of the
present, and while his work bore the clear
marks of an earlier period's melodramatic
tone, he also found space for more
introspective and reflective observations of
life as we live it. Among his most
successful plays were the Civil War romance
Shenandoah, the dramas of marital turmoil
Young Mrs. Winthrop and The Banker's Daughter,
the satire of America's high society
Aristocracy. |
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