Review: Age of Arousal by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Age of Arousal is a strange, febrile comedy. It's like Dickens on drugs, if Dickens were to write about a closed circle of odd women.
These women are "odd" both in the numerical meaning of "not in a pair" and in the metaphorical meaning of "singular" or "remarkable." They are not "unique," because playwright Linda Griffiths intends them to represent for us the plight of women in late 19th century England, where by demographic quirk women outnumbered men by 25%. The sentimental Victorian ideal of cozy, obedient matrimony was an impossibility for many women.
Canadian playwright Linda Griffiths took as her point of departure the 1893 novel The Odd Women by British author George Gissing.
Gissing was ranked by some contemporary British critics alongside Thomas Hardy and George Meredith. A brilliant student from working-class origins, Gissing was expelled from university for stealing from better-off classmates and briefly imprisoned. He spent a year in Chicago and then went back to England in 1877. He churned out a total of 23 novels before his death from emphysema in 1903.
Gissing's social themes were well ahead of his time. He wrote about exploitation of the poor, hypocrisy in religion, the injustices for women in conventional matrimony, and unscrupulous commercial practices.
To our modern sensibilities his prose appears stuffily conventional and uninspired. Take, for example, the opening lines of The Odd Women:
CHAPTER I
THE FOLD AND THE SHEPHERD
'So to-morrow, Alice,' said Dr. Madden, as he walked with his eldest daughter on the coast-downs by Clevedon, 'I shall take steps for insuring my life for a thousand pounds.'
It was the outcome of a long and intimate conversation. Alice Madden, aged nineteen, a plain, shy, gentle-mannered girl, short of stature, and in movement something less than graceful, wore a pleased look as she glanced at her father's face and then turned her eyes across the blue channel to the Welsh hills.
Alice expires early in the book. The novel has two principal plot lines -- the first is that of her sister, orphaned shop girl Monica Madden, who eventually marries, only to discover that her husband is stiff, staid and unjustifiably jealous. The second is that of Rhoda Nunn, a plain woman from equally impoverished origins, who with quick wit, zeal and a dedication to unmarried feminist principle has secured a postion. Rhoda teaches young women to use "Remingtons," the newly available typing machines, to gain employment. A man duly shows up. Everard Barfoot is the reputedly ne'er-do-well cousin of Rhoda's spirited feminist employer Mary Barfoot. The scene is set for discussion of reputations, the desperation of the working classes, antics of impoverished spinsters, perils of conventional marriage, and the kindling of romance.
This subject matter was relatively daring for its time. But Gissing's novel is no Harlequin romance, for he's a good deal more prudish than Thomas Hardy ever was. No bodices get ripped. Monica Madden's greatest transgression is to spend unescorted time with a man not her husband, exchanging some embraces and kisses. As for the undoubtedly juicy rumors about Everard Barfoot's past, Gissing declines even to give us a hint. Instead, the issue becomes whether our feminist heroine Rhoda will accept Everard's denial of those and other calumnies.
Linda Griffiths gleefully runs a bulldozer through this creaky, stuffy structure. She has a fine time raising women's consciousness. Crusading Rhoda, played with handsome self-assurance by Jenny Larson, impulsively invites shop girl Monica and her two equally poverty-stricken unmarried sisters to the Barfoot School. Cute Monica (Kimberly Barrow, left) starts out naive, gets wise to the doctrine of free love and after dallying with Everard becomes a much-paraded paramour. Sister Virginia is a drinker and Sister Alice is a goose. Our heroine Rhoda has long been sleeping with her employer Mary Barfoot (Babs George), the charming free thinker.
Cousin Everard the male love interest, played by the welcome and always reliable Brian Coughlin (above), is indeed a rake. He is appalled to find himself so strongly attracted to the sternly chaste Rhoda. But he says he can flout convention as well as anyone, if only people don't detect it.
Director Lara Toner keeps this playing at an accelerated comic pace, not dissimilar to that of the Playhouse's next-door production of A Flea in Her Ear. Griffiths gives characters lines that she terms "thought speak." This is simply the ancient theatrical device of speaking aloud one's innermost thoughts, with the convention that the other characters do not hear them. Precise Victorian small talk is punctuated by wild inner yearnings or withering comments. The device works just as reliably here as it does in Shakespeare or, a better comparison, in a saloon melodrama. The audience is initially surprised and perhaps confused by the first occurrences. Actors didn't markedly differentiate "thought speak" from open dialogue and there was little or no cue in the lighting or positioning.
The "thought speak" interludes are comic because they are so incongruous. These apparently nineteenth century women are as blunt and frank in their secret speech as any UT undergraduate woman today. Manly Everard's "thought speak" often communicates his desire for these women and his bewilderment at them.
Funny business includes a highly staged visit by all concerned to view an exhibition of impressionist art. The paintings are invisible to us, while the scandal-touched Monica strides confidently about, dressed in bloomers not covered by a skirt. There's a highly comic staging of competitive fainting styles at the end of the first act. The sisters are initially panicked by the sight of the Remingtons, but they come around. School proprietor Mary Barfoot and her protegees even stage typing exhibitions for us, including a remarkable, unannounced and uncredited rendition in typewriter clacks of Mozart's "Minuet in G."
Jenny Larson as the coolly efficient Rhoda (left) is admirable. Though she plays a character who considers her appearance to be "plain," she has the vibrant self certainty of the true believer. Both Babs George and Cyndi Williams are comic and just as energetic as the script.
Jenny Gravenstein is the brightest gem in this setting, in her portrayal of the secretly gin-swilling sister Virginia. In Act 1 Gravenstein is all pratfalls, gestures, long limbs and glassy eyes. In a plot twist completely original to Griffiths, Virginia runs off to Germany with her portion of the meager inheritance. When we see her next, six months later and midway through Act II, Virginia arrives unannounced, in pain, wearing man's clothing. She has just been beaten by louts in the port who objected to her attire. Her life in Berlin was a wonderful liberation, but her simple soul could not handle the sexual ambiguities of it. Gravenstein is marvelously vulnerable and restrained. She touches our sensibilities and counters the hectic comedy with her moving account.
The whole business is concluded with an unsatisfying faux happy ending, very similar to that in the book. We 21st century spectators are not really fooled by that, though. We intuit it to be a send-up of reassuring Victorian convention.
The lines that resound with irony, even through that finale, are from an Act I exchange. Primly confident Rhoda reassures Monica, "Women will certainly gain their equality in another 30 years!" To which Monica replies, dismayed, "But I will be 50 years old by then!"
Given the loose chronology of the play, that bright future is promised for about 1915 -- a date in the midst of the First World War and three years before Parliament gave women the right to vote.
Review by Avimaan Syam in the Austin Chronicle of April 30
EXTRA: Age of Arousal Program in .pdf (2 MB)
Age of Arousal
by Linda Griffiths
Austin Playhouse
