Exhibitionism

The Man Who Came to Dinner: Character Counts

Running Time: 2 hrs, 15 min

He occupies the wheelchair like a throne, a seat of power from which he, by divine right, is able to judge, command, and otherwise lord it over the assorted cretins, dimwits, and nincompoops who surround him. When these incompetents display their idiocy before him, the grimace on his face seems to stretch all the way from one side to the other, and beneath his pinched brow comes a glower that could wither a rose at 50 paces. When he deigns to speak, he cracks wise at these dolts with a droll dismissiveness, as if he were addressing a roomful of chimps.

Once the lights come up on Austin Playhouse’s production of The Man Who Came to Dinner, you scarcely need two minutes to realize that Dirk Van Allen is well-suited to play Sheridan Whiteside, the misanthropic man of letters who terrorizes a Midwestern household in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s 1939 comedy. As soon as he takes the stage, Van Allen gets in touch with his Inner Churl and doesn’t turn it lose until the play’s final moments when it’s revealed that Whiteside, like The Hobbit‘s Smaug the dragon, has a soft spot in his scaly hide after all. The cantankerousness and bluster that this veteran actor has refined into comic gold through the years is applied here with his characteristic skill, such that Whiteside remains a comically compelling figure throughout — even when he’s reeling off names of 1930s celebrities whose fame has vanished in the decades since.

See, the play is very much a comedy of its day, with references to contemporary figures in show business, politics, and society furiously spat out in all directions like bullets from a Tommy gun. Unfortunately for modern audiences, for every name that might still be recognized, there are two that will elicit blank looks; most of the play’s subjects have faded into obscurity. The same might be said of even Whiteside himself, given that he was based on then-famous critic, columnist, and broadcaster Alexander Woolcott, a fact that’s lost on most audience members who aren’t fans of the Algonquin Round Table.

Still, while many of the jokes in The Man Who Came to Dinner may not resonate today, the comedic situation still does. A supercilious intellectual butting heads with a crew of supposedly middlebrow “ordinary” folk? It’s Frasier. Pull the call-in shrink out of the caffeinated Northwest and drop him in America’s Breadbasket, and there you have it. This play has endured long after its topical juices dried up largely because the personalities that drive it are timeless: the curmudgeonly highbrow brought low; the savvy, take-no-guff gal Friday and the gung-ho, boy-next-door newspaperman-playwright she falls for; the narcissistic actress; and so on. Character counts.

It also accounts for most of the pleasures in this show. As with Austin Playhouse’s 2001 production of Moss Hart’s Light Up the Sky, director Don Toner and his experienced cast have focused on creating lively characters of the kind familiar from Thirties and Forties film comedies: slightly exaggerated in behavior but grounded in human emotion. And they succeed to a delightful degree. Van Allen stands (or, rather, sits) front and center in this, but he’s well abetted by Christina Sauer-Dechant as Whiteside’s secretary Maggie, radiating efficiency, brains, and loyalty to her boss, whose verbal attacks she always parries, and deftly; by Mary Agen Cox and David Jones as the hapless couple under siege from Whiteside while he recovers from a fall in their home, projecting bewilderment and apoplexy — she’s flutter, he’s sputter — with amusing excess; by Cyndi Williams as a put-upon nurse, a look of abject terror frozen on her face every time she’s in Whiteside’s presence; by Bernadette Nason as the chipper cook, beaming as she serves Whiteside her latest culinary concoction; by Christa Kimlicko-Jones as the vacuous vamp, who advances on John Hoff’s cornfield sunny playwright like a panther on an unsuspecting lamb; by Ben Wolfe as Banjo, a Hollywood comedian based on Harpo Marx but realized here as a human espresso: a tightly wound, jittery, barely contained bundle of energy; and, most extravagantly and elegantly, by David Stahl as Beverly Carlton, a clone of Noel Coward. Stahl plays the character’s narcissism with the broadest of self-satisfied smiles, like a peacock deliciously pleased with his own resplendence. The energy and real brio that Stahl brings to the role — collapsing on stairs, clambering atop a piano — light up the stage endearingly.

A few of the performances occasionally strain for effect, and the comic timing is uneven in spots, but overall Toner and company prove that this not-so-timely comedy is still worth dusting off. When you have actors possessed of the talent and skill to realize its characters crisply and with spirit, there’s life in the old Man yet.

This article appears in June 7 • 2002.