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Newsday (21/Feb/2007) - THEATER REVIEW, A melancholic route to 'Rose's' roots

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  • article: THEATER REVIEW, A melancholic route to 'Rose's' roots
  • author(s): Linda Winer
  • newspaper: Newsday (21/Feb/2007)
  • keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Mary Rose

Article

THEATER REVIEW, A melancholic route to 'Rose's' roots

The young Alfred Hitchcock is said to have been obsessed with "Mary Rose," the 1920 ghost play that J.M. Barrie wrote 16 years after finding Neverland with "Peter Pan."

In Tina Landau's delicate, vaguely suspenseful production, which opened last night at the Vineyard Theatre, we are reminded less of Hitchcock than of TV's "The Twilight Zone," the handsome old pulp original with Rod Serling's creepy yet reassuring intonations.

For this first major revival in a half-century, the director has invented an onstage narrator in a dark suit — Keir Dullea of "2001: A Space Odyssey" resonance — to recite Barrie's detailed stage directions as part of the storytelling. It is all pretty twee but framed in melancholy and loving shadows. More a curiosity than a revelation, the drama invites us to trace Barrie's lost-child romanticism into more grown-up territory.

Written after the catastrophes of World War I, the tale begins around then in the peeling drawing room of a deserted Sussex house, then leisurely time-travels back three decades to meet the eerily childlike Mary Rose, her happy but secretive parents and a young man from the neighborhood who asks to be her husband.

Paige Howard (daughter of director Ron) has a strapping sort of grace as Mary Rose, who was never told about the time she disappeared on a mysterious island and showed up, weeks later, with no memory of it. Howard, a New York University senior making her professional stage debut, has a crisp, Julie Andrews naturalness, and a physicality that well serves a woman stuck in the exuberance of hyper-extended girlhood.

Long after Wendy had to sew on Peter Pan's shadow, Barrie still was invigorating the world with anthropomorphisms that some may find overly precious but we find charming. The abandoned room, we are told by the narrator, used to be known by its smile. The strange island in Scotland's Outer Hebrides was perhaps too eager for visitors.

We understand Mary Rose's girlishness as part of the menace — or the promise? — of the island's spell. But Barrie also shows an even sadder reluctance to face adulthood on the part of her parents — played with a sensitive lack of cuteness by Michael Countryman and Betsy Aidem. Through the years, the father and his friend (Tom Riis Farrell) squabble like boys over their collections of prints. But we don't see his deeper selfishness until he retreats from the truth about his daughter.

We enter the story when a young soldier from Australia (Richard Short, with a nice swagger) takes a tour of the house led by an old, sharp caretaker (Susan Blommaert). Why won't she let him open a door at one end of the room (designed with unsettling perspective by James Schuette)? Are the rumors true about an angry ghost in there?

Darren Goldstein has a pleasant lack of affect as Mary Rose's adoring husband, whom she swears she saw transform "from a boy to a man" when he proposed. Ian Brennan is especially fun to watch as the Scottish university student who, on summer break, rows the couple back to the island that stole her away.

Mary Rose's father, frightened by old age and new mysteries, insists that Mary Rose "belongs to the past." So does the play, though we're not a bit sorry to make its acquaintance.

MARY ROSE, by J.M. Barrie, directed by Tina Landau. Through March 18 at the Vineyard Theatre, 108 E. 15th St., Manhattan. Tickets $60. Call 212-353-0303. Seen at Saturday afternoon preview.