THE NEWYORKER, MAY 9, 2022 79
that the show provides its own inter-
pretive key, it comes through the An-
trobuses’ maid, Sabina (Gabby Beans),
who begins the play with a long, semi-
hysterical monologue, which Beans de-
livers with a campy rasp reminiscent of
Eartha Kitt. Sometimes, intriguingly,
Beans steps apart from the play and ad-
dresses the audience, the accent slip-
ping away to reveal a more natural, less
strained voice.
“I hate this play and every word in
it,” she says:
As for me, I don’t understand a single word
of it, anyway—all about the troubles the human
race has gone through, there’s a subject for you.
Besides, the author hasn’t made up his silly
mind as to whether we’re all living back in caves
or in 1950s Jersey, and that’s the way it is all
the way through.
Oh—why can’t we have plays like we used
to have—South Pacific, and Vanya and Sonya
and Masha and Spike, and Bootycandy!—good
entertainment with a message you can take
home with you?
My own twinned aversion to and
fascination with the play reminded me
of Marianne Moore and her vexed re-
lationship with poetry, her true love. “I,
too, dislike it,” she wrote. But, as Sa-
bina starts to understand the play bet-
ter, she keeps signalling her growing
awareness to the audience in asides,
with speech that I could only think of
as a kind of generosity.
A
ny audience member these days
will also, like the Antrobuses, have
some end-time scenario in mind; the
play’s final act takes place in the after-
math of a seven-year-long war, which
seems as probable today as it must have
when the show premièred, in the early
forties. The brilliance of Blain-Cruz’s
production is that it’s not so much a
faithful adaptation as a work of criti-
cism, thinking through Wilder’s play
even as it dramatizes the narrative, vi-
sually and sonically echoing the dense
thematic thicket of the text. The script,
which has been augmented with mod-
ernizing touches by the playwright
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, calls for a di-
nosaur and a woolly mammoth, and
their very appearance—helped along
fluidly by a team of puppeteers wear-
ing earth tones—acts almost as a sym-
bol of the play’s odd scaffolding, brought
into the world and held up by Blain-
Cruz’s plucky troupe.
Adam Rigg’s sets, an obvious re-
sponse to Blain-Cruz’s brainy exuber-
ance, are marvellous—the Atlantic City
boardwalk in Act II, complete with a
working slide, almost took my atten-
tion away from the actors. Later, in the
last act, a starkly beautiful display of
flowers and tall grasses made its own
statement, quite apart from the play’s
text, about the world’s overabundance
of loveliness, and how wantonly it re-
veals itself, even in the worst moments
for the species.
The best exponent of this kind of
onstage thought is Ruff ’s Mrs. Antro-
bus, who, in the second act, is called
upon by the members of the “Ancient
and Honorable Order of Mammals,
Subdivision Humans,” of which George
has just been elected president, to give
a speech. She and George are about to
celebrate their five-thousandth wed-
ding anniversary—“I regret every mo-
ment of it,” she says, supposedly by ac-
cident—and the Order would like to
hear some words about their marriage.
It’s an interesting contrast: the con-
flicts in the play are civilizational, on an
existential level for the species—wars,
glaciers, shortages of food. So perhaps
it’s only right that moments such as
Mrs. Antrobus’s ensuing speech and Sa-
bina’s furtive communication with the
audience are forms of address that touch
our hearts and try, however feebly, to
reach our deepest needs at their roots:
lines that feel like disclosures from an
equally bewildered friend; a speech used
to hearten, even amid frustration.
Mrs. Antrobus hadn’t planned to
speak, but she gives a short oration that
Ruff, through a series of pauses and
thoughtful facial expressions, turns into
a kind of thesis statement for the show—
and perhaps a guide for those seeing
and thinking about it, via allegory, today.
“My husband says that the watchword
from the year is Enjoy Yourselves. I think
that’s very open to misunderstanding,”
she says, warding off hedonism as a re-
sponse to trouble. Instead, the words
she shares counsel collaboration and to-
getherness, a kind of antidote to thin
entertainment—and to needless frac-
tures among people who, in the end,
need one another. “My watchword for
the year is: Save the Family. It’s held
together for over five thousand years:
Save it! Thank you.” MAINE | CHILTONS.COM
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