Players Stage Idle-Rich Parody

The Southampton Players, always an innovative troupe when it comes to programming ideas, kicked off its new season last Thursday night with an inspired selection: a revival of Dawn Powell's controversial satire, "Jig Saw."

According to a program note by its director, William M. Peterson, an English professor at the college, this is the play's first production since it premiered at the Theater Guild in New York in 1934 - quite a coup for the college and for Mr. Peterson, whose idea it was.

As many of you may know, Ms. Powell's work is enjoying quite a revival. Her "Diaries" were published in 1995, edited by Tim Page, who is also writing a biography due out next year. Some of her 15 novels, long out of print, also are being reissued.

Recast As Farce

Mr. Peterson, an actor, director, and former head of the college's theater program, writes that he contacted the all-but-forgotten Ms. Powell in the 1950s and arranged for her to receive an honorary degree from Lake Erie (Pa.) College, where he was then teaching.

She later sent him a copy of "Jig Saw" and a letter describing its history. Intended as a "scathing picture of idle women spending their husbands' money or alimony in New York apartment hotels, shopping one day and taking the stuff back the next, hoping for Something or Other to fill their days without their expending any energy themselves," it had to be revised when a similar "too brutal, too real" satire of hers moved a critic to call her a Communist.

By recasting her material in the punctilious convention of the French farce she hoped to insulate herself from further accusations of political incorrectness, heading witch hunters off at the pass, so to speak.

Sixty-Three Years

"Audiences can absorb as little meaning as they like so long as the function of comedy - to amuse - is fulfilled. . . ," she wrote. "There is, in a word, no voice, no pointer to the moral."

Audiences were amused, according to Mr. Peterson, but felt guilty about enjoying such seemingly superficial fluff as the Depression ravaged America and Hitler's Germany prepared for war.

"Frivolity was out of fashion," he wrote; "Jig Saw" lay dormant for 63 years.

Michael Disher, who is the Southampton Players' talented director, sets a stylish stage for this thoroughly enjoyable evening with an elegant New York hotel suite and ultra-chic costume design. He also was producer this time around.

Everything is so coolly gray, white, or martini-shaker silver that when Claire Burnell (Winifred Boyd), the mom from hell, takes a bright green dress out of its box, it's as if a bomb had exploded.

"Jig Saw" casts a merciless eye on what today would undoubtedly be called child neglect. Among the very rich, it took the form of mothers simply never having their children around long enough to interfere with their romantic entanglements.

By shipping them off to this boarding school or that foreign country, they kept the home decks cleared for more trivial pursuits, including working on the ever-present jigsaw puzzle of the title, which sits on a table stage front.

Mother-Daughter Fight

The play opens with Claire's having just crashed a wedding breakfast, where she fell for the much younger Nathan Gifford (Chris Rogers), unaware that her daughter, Julie (Rose McCutchen), while off at school in Paris, had gotten a crush on him, too.

A mother-daughter fight for the poor guy, a feebly aspiring writer, ensues. He, of course, prefers the perks of Claire's lifestyle to "the unwavering worship of a pure young girl."

Amid cocktails and laughter and smoke from long black cigarette-holders, Claire's earlier lover, Del (Ray Hamlin), her best friend, Letty (Monica Mercedes), her maid, Rosa (Angela Fuori), a neighboring playwright, Frank (P.J. Palladino), and his wife, Ethel (Sharilyn Costello), mill around helping each other kill time.

Lots Of Action

There's also a fortune teller, played as a sort of family therapist with gusto by Devin Rodger, Isadore Simpson (Paul Conroy), Frank's collaborator, and Michael Norton and Nick Hamblet, a hotel porter and bellboy.

Mr. Peterson has inserted a lot of action into what might have seemed a talky period piece. People stride about, refill their drinks, gesticulate wildly, and generally animate things to amusing dramatic effect.

There's certainly never a dull moment, and what with the sometimes uneven but often excellent acting, especially by the leads, the evening is great fun indeed.

Honorees

Mr. Peterson's nostalgic sound design also contributes authenticity to this comedy of manners. He has sought out bouncy, tinny vintage recordings of songs like "Night and Day" and "Anything Goes," and these ghostly voices tinkling through the auditorium during intermissions echo Ms. Powell's wry parody of what passes for deathless passion among the leisure classes.

The comedy will be on the Fine Arts Theatre stage again this weekend, with performances at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday nights.