APT in the Wall Street Journal

New reviews of The Circle, Another Part of the Forest and Major Barbara from Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal. Not good for the geese By Terry Teachout Long before he became one of the world's most popular novelists, Somerset Maugham was one of England's most successful playwrights. Four of his new plays actually ran simultaneously in London's West End in 1908, an achievement that makes Neil Simon look like a piker. But Maugham's brand of high social comedy had fallen from grace long before his death in 1965. It's been 21 years since any of his plays was successfully mounted on Broadway, and that one, "The Circle," presumably owed its success to the presence in the cast of Rex Harrison. While Maugham revivals are not unknown in this country, one almost always has to get out of New York to see them. So I hastened to Wisconsin's American Players Theatre, one of America's top classical companies, to find out how well "The Circle," which was first performed in London in 1921, has held up, and the answer-to my surprise-is that it is not merely viable but brilliant. Most of Maugham's other plays, to be sure, are period pieces that merit the dusty obscurity into which they long ago fell, but "The Circle" is different. Instead of the not-quite-Wilde-enough epigrams of "The Constant Wife," we get a drawing room full of well-dressed but plain-spoken characters who might have stepped out of one of Maugham's own short stories, plus a plot so soundly made that you'll be engrossed as soon as the wheels start turning. Lady Kitty (Tracy Michelle Arnold), the fallen woman at the center of "The Circle," walked out on Clive (Brian Mani), her husband, 30 years ago and ran off to Italy with Lord Porteous (James Ridge), Clive's best friend. Now Kitty and her aging consort have returned to England for the first time to pay a call on Arnold (Paul Hurley), her son, who was 5 years old when she bolted and is now a promising but priggish young politician who recoils at the thought of further scandal. Little does Arnold know that Elizabeth (Susan Shunk), his wife, has fallen for another man and is thinking of doing as Lady Kitty did. Enter Clive, who sees history about to repeat itself and is determined to nip Elizabeth's nascent romance in the bud before it's too late. Such a plot lends itself equally well to comedy and tragedy, and though Maugham described "The Circle" as a comedy on the title page, it isn't hard to detect a pungent whiff of seriousness in the parallel situations of Lady Kitty and her starry-eyed daughter-in-law, who has only the vaguest notion of how her comfortable upper-class life would be ripped to shreds were she to leave her exceedingly proper husband for another man. (Small wonder that Maugham, who in real life left his own wife for another man, saw Elizabeth's plight as the stuff of a memorable play.) At the same time, much of the charm of "The Circle" lies in the light-fingered sleight-of-hand with which Maugham keeps you from guessing who'll end up with whom until just before the curtain falls. One of the ways in which he brings off this neat trick is to ensure that all of his characters have mixed motives. This is a play without a hero-or a villain-and that ambiguity is what gives "The Circle" its unexpectedly contemporary feel. Never do you hear the telltale creak of contrivance. The conceit of "The Circle" may be artificial, but the characters, for all their Edwardian badinage ("I've noticed that you always get the best food if you come in unexpectedly and have the same as they're having in the servants' hall"), conduct themselves as though it were realistic, and so you believe in it as firmly as they do. James Bohnen, the departing artistic director of Chicago's Remy Bumppo Theatre Company, a troupe whose work I greatly admire, has caught the tone of "The Circle" with perfect exactitude, and his cast, which consists for the most part of old APT hands, is with him all the way. Ms. Shunk, who is so fine as Birdie in this season's revival of Lillian Hellman's "Another Part of the Forest," is, if anything, even more appealing as Elizabeth. At first her naivete seems a bit much-you want to kick some sense into her-but before long you'll find yourself hoping against hope that she'll refuse to settle for the respectable life of a politician's wife. As for Mr. Mani, whose lip-smackingly urbane performance in APT's 2008 production of Shaw's "Widower's Houses" remains fresh in my memory, I can say no better than that he is the very embodiment of Maugham's description of Clive: "He is a man who makes the most of himself. He bears his years jauntily." If you can't get to Spring Green, Conn.'s Westport Country Playhouse will be mounting "The Circle" next summer in a production directed by Nicholas Martin. I don't doubt that his staging will be worth seeing, but APT's version is going to be an awfully tough act to follow. Also, see When Hellman's Foxes Were Kits for reviews of Another Part of the Forest and Major Barbara