The Constant Wife – Still “Constant” After All These Years
It’s not easy for us, today, to grasp how profoundly living through the First World War changed people’s attitudes toward sex. By the mid-1920s, all that remained of 19th century Victorian morality was its hypocrisy: married men could be winked at, even admired, for taking lovers—but not married women.
Theatergoers could enjoy many risqué farces centering on adultery or unconventional couplings—the sort of plays we nowadays associate with Noel Coward. But he came late to the genre. Until he hit his stride in the ‘30s, the field belonged to W. Somerset Maugham (b. 1874), who’d had titillating plays produced while Coward (b. 1899) was still in nappies. Wait. Maugham? The serious novelist? Author of The Moon and Sixpence, Of Human Bondage, and The Razor’s Edge? That Maugham? Yes. But writing those novels was (as it were) Maugham’s second act.
THE AFFAIR. Vanessa Shaw (Marie-Louise) and Grant Machan (John)
His 1926 play The Constant Wife was one of his biggest hits. Ethel Barrymore created the titular role of Constance whose surgeon husband John has for years carried on an affair with her best friend, Marie-Louise. Act 1 opens with Constance’s mother, Mrs. Culver, and sister Martha shocked—not by the fact that John has “a mistress,” but by the shame of being the last in their upper-class set to have learned of it!
No one wants to break the news to Constance. But in Act 2, Marie-Louise’s husband Mortimer storms in, confronting his wife with the cigarette case John left under her pillow. But Constance deflects the accusation, claiming it’s her case and (this being a comedy) convinces him to apologize for besmirching his wife’s honor. Why? Because she has known about the affair all along!
Eleven years ago, “in a stroke of luck,” she says, “we fell out of love with each other at the same time.” John’s genuine warmth and friendship—and financial support—has been enough to content her. But now this teapot-size tempest pushes her to seek “economic freedom.”
THE REUNITED. Jenny Tucker (Constance) and Nick Denning (Bernard)
As Act 2 ends, she accepts an offer of work as an interior designer. And by the time Act 3 begins, 18 months later…
A woman yearning for and achieving economic freedom wasn’t a new plot: in 1912, it drove James M. (“Peter Pan”) Barrie’s celebrated one-act comedy “The Twelve-Pound Look.” But in the louche, post-War moral climate, Maugham could take that trope to meet its inevitable, teleological destiny. Having achieved financial independence, Constance is free to demand “sexual independence” too.
Proscenium layout suited director Jeffery V. Thompson’s stagecraft. He gave everyone enough movement and business to overcome the tendency of drawing-room farces to be static. The marks for some of the period-appropriate furniture, however, were too-closely set, forcing a few actors to scuttle between pieces or around each other. Their confusion may have been manifested at Thompson’s direction, but it looked unintentional.
Harlan D. Penn’s scenic design for the Middletons’ living room offered the cast several ways to enter and exit; a short staircase to the auditorium floor signifies the street below. It wasn’t always clear why characters, other than the doctor, came in or went out the way they did.
For a production with a modest budget, the costumes by Katherine Robertson evoked 1920s styles satisfactorily, but not always convincingly. I assume it was Robertson’s intent that Constance’s fringed frocks should, as they did, upstage everyone else’s attire.
The play has been revived occasionally, on and off Broadway, and was adapted into the (pre-Code) 1929 film Charming Sinners. In the first week of November, the Out of the Box Theatre Company put The Constant Wife on stage for just five performances in the Bernie Wohl Center, at Goddard Riverside Community Center. The company focuses on the classics, enhancing them with period-appropriate music—here played and sung by Music Director Cary Gant, who also takes the supporting role of Bentley the butler.
It is Out of the Box’s mission “to feature working professionals at their peak and in their prime: seasoned actors . . . primarily past 50 years of age.” The cast included Darrie Lawrence (as Mrs. Culver), Grant Machan (John), Gloria Sauve (Barbara), and Roumel Reaux (Mortimer).
CAST: Jenny Tucker (Constance), Elizabeth Hayden (Martha), Vanessa Shaw (Marie-Louise) and Nick Denning (Bernard) were the peak performers.
Photos by Bob Johnson
Opening: THE CONFRONTATION – L-R seated: Vanessa Shaw (Marie-Louise), Jenny Tucker (Constance), Elizabeth Hayden (Martha). L-R standing: Grant Machan (John), Roumel Reaux (Mortimer).
Out of the Box is a 501c(3) not-for-profit organization, and as much an Upper West Side community treasure as a performing arts company. It donates complimentary tickets to lower-income seniors and/or disabled patrons through various organizations throughout New York City.
