The supposed attraction in 2015 of this minor theatrical piece by a major fiction writer is that it will appeal to “Downton Abbey” fans. Why? Like Cora in that show, Somerset Maugham’s women are rich Americans who marry European aristocrats, give them money, and get their titles and social status. Afterward all the women live in luxury in England. Further, Our Betters is said to amplify the Asolo’s exploration of the American character, currently focusing on women and money. But these claims for producing the play are a stretch.
There aren’t and never were so many women like Maugham’s who could be said to represent a significant segment of Americans or their character. While money was important to women back in 1915 (when the play was written) and 1923 (the play’s debut), it still is, and not just to Americans. Their reason for flaunting it then and in the play was to make everyone, especially in high society, think them “our (us commoner folk’s) betters.” Today, as always, most women want money for security first, then empowerment.
At the center of Maugham’s women’s stories, greedy Pearl, who arranges never to be with her Baron, is using all her cunning and wiles (beautifully demonstrated by Katie Cunningham) to solidify her position as doyenne of London society. She wants her sister Bessie (Allie Henkel, influenced yet apprehensive) to emulate her by marrying Romanian Lord Beane (Matt Andersen, appealing), who turns out to actually love Bessie. A complication arrives in the person of Bessie’s former fiance, Buddy Haardt’s observant Fleming Harvey. As the moral center of the play, he contrasts with the foppish Thornton, played by Tom Coiner. Believing, as he incorrectly and comically demonstrates, that he has acquired a fine English accent, Thornton maintains the English are refined, Americans not. He’s a guest often invited for his gossip. Pearl’s best friends include lonely Flora, known as the Princess by virtue of marrying her unloved, now absentee Italian. Denise Cormier shows regrets about leaving her American home, which she tries to overcome by raising money among socialites for causes. Pearl’s most extravagant friend, bearing the title Duchesse de Surennes given by her divorced husband, talks almost-poor but has the most money. Hefty Anne-Marie Cusson personifies excess in dress, speech, and manners as the Duchesse. She’s pathetic in her obsession with gigolo Tony (Ben Diskant, adrift in sexuality and greed), half her age. There’s an undercurrent of rivalry with Pearl that finally comes to the surface. Pearl’s plans for a grand holiday in her country home with her friends and Arthur Fenwick, Jonathan Epstein’s wonderfully realistic, tough old American tycoon. He’s nuts about her and provides considerable extra money for her extravagant doings. When the country set up goes awry due to a sexual indiscretion by Pearl, she has to try to keep everyone from leaving early or be swept away by the scandal of it. That’s the play’s major conflict as well as climax! All in all, it takes more than two acts and intermissions to begin getting things resolved. Then it happens mostly by Pearl summoning Ernest, a dancing master (lively David Breitbarth in a hilarious cameo)! He’s a sort of deus ex machine recalling how Oscar Wilde saved an Earnest and also created many one-line zingers, as Maugham does.
Despite some interesting acting, Tracy Dorman’s extravagant costumes are the best thing about the production. Asolo’s audience, which seems to always applaud scenery before it proves appropriate to the action, atmosphere, and period of a play, loved Lee Savage’s extravagant design of an unlikely London reception room with walls muraled as if a blown-up version of a fashion and cosmetic counter background in Selfridge’s. In the country, Pearl’s all-purpose lovely green and gold off-garden salon, like the London set, has two settees on which characters sit and talk as much or more to the audience than to each other.
I guess if Michael Donald Edwards thinks Our Betters is a lot like “Downton Abbey” in its appeal, he’d rather admit that mistake than think his direction was responsible for an appreciable--and unusual--early exodus on opening night. He can’t blame it on the Butler, Brian Owen’s Pole (or Pearl’s other servants played by Gracie Lee Brown and Paul Herbig).
