Also this issue:

Paperback Riders
Local commuters (re)discover the pleasures of reading in transit.
-Toby Zinman

Tabloid Sensation
Bat Boy invades suburban household! With terrifyingly good results!
-David Anthony Fox

Hanging in the Balance
The negative and the positive find a happy medium in Isabel Bigelow’s work.
-Susan Hagen

Telling the Truth
-Lori Hill

Twists of Fate
-Deni Kasrel

Highway to Art
-A.D. Amorosi

Weathering the Storm
-Janet Anderson

Art of the Deal
-Lori Hill

May 29-June 4, 2003

art

Industry Standard

by David Anthony Fox

Once In A Lifetime, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s comedy about the exigencies of early moviemaking, was a big Broadway hit in 1930 … yet it takes a brave theater to produce the play today.

One problem is that the scale of the piece (40-plus characters, five different settings) could traumatize even the healthiest budget. More seriously, the Hollywood of Kaufman and Hart's day, with its gothic studio system and Wizard of Oz-like moguls, seems like a different world from today's industry town.

The biggest challenge, though, is in the shifting nature of American humor. Contemporary comedies are faster and leaner, the jokes more corrosive and frequent. The gently amiable Lifetime, with its leisurely pace (the first act is nearly 90 minutes) and corny one-liners ("What's a four-letter word for Œactor?'"-- "Dope"), has become a historical artifact. Frankly, I'm not sure it's possible now for audiences to comprehend that, not so long ago, Kaufman and Hart were universally acknowledged as comic geniuses.

Still, Lifetime has a whiff of charm -- and potentially, there's more than that.

Jerry, George and May are an out-of-work vaudeville team, stationed in a fleabag New York hotel and facing the end of the two-a-day era. When May is hit with an inspirational idea -- that they should open a school of diction and elocution for movie actors trying to make a transition into the new world of talkies -- the group (like so many other performers of the era) crosses the country to find better fortune.

During the darkest days of the Depression, Lifetime allowed audiences to fantasize about the transformative power of a Hollywood, where poor folk from the Dust Bowl could become movie stars, and immigrant Jews could rise to unimaginable power as studio chiefs.

At People's Light, director Lou Jacob has added a meta-theatrical device (we're watching the company making a movie) that distances us even more from Lifetime, and there's so much physical busy-ness that we keep losing track of our trio of protagonists. Some of the principal acting lacks real comic élan and period style, and almost all of it misses the undercurrent of desperation that can make the old play touch our hearts.

In the plus column, Lifetime is given a sumptuous visual treatment, and a number of company veterans contribute winning cameo performances, especially Marcia Saunders in the dual role of a dragon-lady columnist and a Midwestern mother, and Lenny Haas as a Johnny-on-the-spot bellboy.

Once In A Lifetime

Through June 15, People’s Light & Theatre Company, 39 Conestoga Rd., Malvern, 610-644-3500