Review: The Recruiting Officer

By Marie Kilker, TotalTheater.com | July 25, 2018

“Be All You Can Be” promises the sign over a recruiting booth in Shrewsburg, England, September 1774. It is, of course, a trap to get gullible men to fight the French—or any other thing their nation and officers choose. The set’s a lively market in a village next to the water and a ship. Here Irishman author George Farquhar’s text will set up an edgy drama of love and war—but a comedy because its central couples end happily.

Norman Holland, that great scholar of “The First Modern Comedies” in English, called Farquhar “the last and least of the great comic dramatists of the Restoration.” Even though his The Beaux Stratagem has been his most staged play in recent decades, American Players has found the one that has most significance today. And it rates with me just as high artistically as the plays I’ve seen by “the masters” Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve.

I may, of course, be influenced by American Players’ manifestation of what Hugh Hunt, expert on Restoration acting, has called those actors’ “basic training...(in) speech, singing, dancing, stance, gesture and walking.” Here, luckily, a bridge is crossed between Restoration mannerisms and modern style, much helped by American Players’ refusal to mic actors. Director William Brown has them shun both naturalistic and melodramatic methods and gets just the right blend of realistic and grand manners.

Full story