Martin Denton · November
27, 2009
What a show Under the Gaslight must have been for
our great-great-great grandparents and their contemporaries who may
have seen it when it premiered in New York in 1867! The exciting story
takes audiences from Delmonico's Restaurant to a squalid downtown
tenement to the Police Court at the Tombs to a pier along the Hudson
River to a railroad station near Long Branch, New Jersey—and it is
outside that remote station that the play's most famous scene takes
place, the one in which someone is tied to the railroad tracks by a
heartless villain, the first occasion where that now-familiar method of
would-be murder was put before the public. The scene is still quite
thrilling, as we discover in Metropolitan Playhouse's revival of this
otherwise mostly forgotten American classic.
Daly's originality in the railroad scene is not always matched
elsewhere: his plot seems drawn mostly from the works of Charles
Dickens, with a dash of Les Miserables thrown in for good
measure. Its heroine is Laura Courtland, the angelic and guileless
adopted daughter of a rich New York family (the kind of character Mary
Pickford played so well in the silent melodramas beloved by the
generations following Under the Gaslight's introduction).
During its five increasingly harrowing acts, whose locations I have
already outlined above, Laura goes from one tumultuous challenge to
another: her "low" birth as a street urchin is revealed, jeopardizing
her planned marriage to wealthy Ray Trafford; the unrelievedly
villainous Byke, who claims to be her father, turns up out of nowhere
to harass and threaten her; her former Fagin-like boss/protector Old
Judas tracks her down; and when things get really scary, she is
kidnapped and then dumped into the river to be drowned. (And all of
this comes before the big climactic railroad scene.)
Daly's plotting has a kind of social conscience: in some ways,
Under the Gaslight feels like a precursor to the
eye-opening photography of Jacob Riis, revealing to its upscale audience the
ugly reality of life in the slums as lived by the down-and-out Laura
and Peachblossom, the earnest young woman (also a former victim of Old
Judas) whom Laura takes in as servant and friend. Perhaps even more
socially relevant is the character of Snorkey, who is a former Union
soldier who lost an arm during the war and now struggles courageously
to support himself despite the lack of veteran's benefits provided by
the government he so loyally served. In celebrating these down-trodden
but heroic ordinary folk, Daly bucked the trend of theatre of his day.
But for all its democratic American tendencies, Under the
Gaslight in one important way feels most un-American, and that's
in its insistence that someone born in less-than-aristocratic
circumstances is somehow intrinsically deficient. Though we are meant
to deplore Ray's behavior when he breaks his engagement with Laura
after he discovers her true history, we are also meant to understand
and empathize with it. Daly's ending reinforces the idea still further.
In an age when the commonest of American men—Abraham Lincoln—had only
recently been martyred in his effort to save his country, it seems
surprising that such snobbery could also exist. Yet, apparently, it
did.
Metropolitan Playhouse, as is their custom (and to their
credit), does nothing to gloss over this in their revival of Under
the Gaslight. We see the play as Daly wrote it, warts and all. The
script's simple-mindedness throughout makes it quaint though never
unplayable, but this is a production that's more notable for what it
shows us about our theatrical/social history than for the quality of
its language or dramaturgy. Metropolitan's intimate playing space
prevents the re-creation of the spectacular effects that must have
accompanied Daly's original production; director Michael Hardart and
set designer Alex Roe meet the challenge mostly with alacrity, with the
railroad scene working out the best. Costumer Sidney Fortner provides
period-appropriate duds that serve the piece beautifully.
Hardart does seem to waver in places as to whether to treat
the play as a serious melodrama or, postmodernly, as camp. J. M.
McDonough as the villainous Byke and Lian-Marie Holmes as Peachblossom
play the earnest two-dimensionality of their characters forthrightly,
while Amanda Jones as virtuous Laura seems sometimes to be reaching for
a psychological underpinning to her role that just isn't there—her
Laura feels too modern to be the heroine of a melodrama. Also
problematic is the work of Brad Fraizer, who is splendidly good-natured
as Snorkey but never feels like the play's hero, which is what he turns
out to be. A grand touch on the part of Hardart, though, is the use of
the excellent Ralph Petrarca as a piano player who provides
near-continuous accompaniment to the piece, in the manner of a silent
movie score. (The music that he plays is uncredited; I picked up bits
and pieces of many popular songs of the 19th century along with
familiar pre-talkie chords and phrases.)
Metropolitan Playhouse is the place in New York where
theatre-goers can explore our collective past; in the words of their
mission, "discovering where we come from to better know who we are." Under
the
Gaslight is revelatory in many ways as an artifact of American
drama and American life just after the Civil War. Who else gives us
such a compelling opportunity to venture backward in time?
Reviewed by Karl Levett
November 28, 2009
Having a one-armed man tied to the railroad tracks was the original
sensation of Augustin Daly's 1867 melodrama "Under the Gaslight," so
much so that Daly attempted to copyright the device. But it was to be
repeated by subsequent dramatists and early filmmakers; in fact, the
bound body on the tracks became the cliché signifying the
extremes of melodrama. It has left been left to the Metropolitan
Playhouse, whose commendable mission is to excavate America's
theatrical heritage, to show contemporary New Yorkers that Daly's first
hit play has much more meat on its melodramatic bones than the sum of
its excesses. While being a fast-paced yarn, it also provides a
surprisingly intriguing picture of post–Civil War New York. Yes, the
colors are heightened, but it still imprints the contradictions and
dangers of 1867 society in Dickensian detail. And the good news is that
in this production, under the astute direction of Michael Hardart, the
history is the underpinning of a rollicking roller coaster of a tale
that Hardart and his hard-working company deliver as a bundle of fun, a
holiday gift for New York.
At center stage is a boater-wearing piano man (Ralph Petrarca) who
plays a musical accompaniment to the action throughout as we watch the
fortunes of our lovely heroine, Laura Courtland (Amanda Jones). Laura
discovers on the eve of her marriage to young Civil War veteran Ray
Trafford (Justin Flagg) that she, as a child, was taken from the
streets. When her secret past is exposed, she is rejected by society
and hides out in New York's lower depths, pursued by Byke (J.M.
McDonough), the villain of the piece, and her fiancé. The action
ranges in New York from Delmonico's to the Tombs, while in New Jersey
there are Long Branch and those dreaded train tracks at Shrewsbury Bend.
All this is contained on the Metropolitan Playhouse's small playing
space. Hardart's true achievement, however, is making his production
confidently walk the knife edge between sincerity and send-up. The
performance is filled with small directorial touches that
affectionately morph the play's melodrama into humor. Jones' steadfast
rendering of Laura supplies the sincerity: She takes a couple of the
play's purple passages and makes them sound totally convincing. Indeed,
Jones is a handsome actor who has a quality uncommon among younger
American performers: an innate sense of the period she is playing in.
Brad Fraizer is able to make the one-armed Snorkey both comic and
touching, while in the busy company that doubles and triples,
Lian-Marie Holmes' perky Blossom and Richard Cottrell's kindly
signalman are especially authentic.
Exit, Pursued by
Swells
and Lowlifes
By ANITA GATES
Published: November 30, 2009
Laura’s horrible secret has been exposed. Beautiful in her
white 19th-century gown, she exits the party, stricken. Spontaneous
applause breaks out at the Metropolitan Playhouse. Clearly,
142-year-old melodrama can still be fun.
The play is Augustin Daly’s “Under the Gaslight,” first produced in
1867. In its current incarnation we learn that bad poor people prey on
good rich people and that upper-class New Yorkers regularly used the
word “ain’t.”
Amanda Jones is radiant as Laura Courtland, an angelic
society girl with a perfect life. She is rapturously engaged to the
sophisticated Ray Trafford (Justin Flagg); close to her bubbly cousin
Pearl (Sarah Hankins); and so kind that when a messenger seems hungry,
she instructs her butler to give the man wine and supper.
But the letter that the messenger, Snorkey (Brad Fraizer),
has brought reveals Laura’s true origins. At 6 she was a street urchin
trying to steal from the upper-crust Courtlands. Pitying her, they took
her in and passed her off as a cousin. Once Laura’s smart set learns
about this, her life is ruined, and she runs away to earn her own keep
working as a photographer’s assistant. Will Ray desert her or try to
win her back? Will she be able to make it on her own? Will the evil
street criminals win custody of Laura, who is 19?
A larger question relates to producing old melodrama. Is it
success to make 21st-century theatergoers feel as involved as
19th-century audiences surely were? Or does success mean getting solid
laughs from what we see as overwrought dialogue and behavior?
The Metropolitan Playhouse’s production, directed by Michael
Hardart, does a little of both, sometimes shakily, sometimes buoyantly.
At the very least, it’s decidedly intriguing to see this theatrical
form come to life.
Daly, the playwright, contended that “Under the Gaslight” was
the first piece of fiction in which a villain attempted murder by tying
a character to railroad tracks. Earlier examples have been cited, but
Daly took his claim all the way to the Supreme Court
and won damages.
The performance is accompanied by live piano music, played with
silent-movie gusto by Ralph Petrarca. Some of his riffs are so old they
seem new again.