And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little
And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little, by Paul Zindel; Darlinghurst Theatre, May 29–June 21, 2008; (61 2) 8356 9987 or www.darlinghursttheatre.com. Cast: Helen O’Connor, Lucinda Armour, Monique Spanbrook, Nicholas Papademetriou, May Lloyd, Bernadette Hughson, Dominic Di Tommaso & Vincent Jones Varga; Director: Nicholas Papademetriou; Set Design: John Pryce Jones; Lighting Design: Nicholas Higgins; Costume Design: Chrissie Adams. Producers: Darlinghurst Theatre Company and 3Some Productions.
Three years before Miss Reardon first tottered tipsily to life in 1967, New Yorker Paul Zindel’s play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigold was produced on Broadway and was to overshadow his dramatic output for the rest of his long career. Marigold was a huge hit off- and on Broadway in 1970-71, won him a Pulitzer Prize and became a movie directed by Paul Newman. It starred Newman’s wife Joanne Woodward as a character that features strongly in Zindel’s ouevre: the alcoholically dysfunctional mother.
Zindel continued to write plays until 1998 but his main output over the decades, until shortly before his death in 2003, was (occasionally controversial) children’s books, most of which remain in print in the United States.
And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little was first staged in Sydney at the Independent Theatre some 25 years ago with current director Nicholas Papademetriou in the role of the delivery boy. Papademetriou has changed a lot since then, but in the main, the world of the play has not. It’s broader themes are the difficulty and toughness of city life; the difficulty of getting relationships right and the even greater difficulty of sorting out lives fractured early on by abandonment (father) and bitterness (mother).
These dark themes are at once leavened and sharply focused by some sharp, wise-cracking New York humour. Zindel knows how to sugar the unpalatable side of human nature and make it very funny; at the same time he doesn’t lose sight of the pain beneath the jokes.
Anna – Miss Reardon – is the subject of school gossip for her not so secret tippling; Catherine is in the middle of a florid nervous collapse having decided – during a recuperative tour of Europe – that a stray cat encounter has given her rabies; meanwhile their elder sister Ceil is a chilly control freak who pinched Anna’s boyfriend, “attended” to their mother’s belongings to her own advantage and is now in a position of power over both sisters as a district supervisor of schools.
They are visited – like it or not – by Mrs Pentrano, the nosy wife of the apartment building’s janitor; and crucially, by a work colleague Fleur Stein and her husband Bob. Mrs Stein is as loud and welcome as a blowfly and is the catalyst for some revelations that discomfit everyone to some degree.
On opening night (and the season is now well progressed by the time you read this) accents were wayward and a couple had never been within cooee of Manhattan. But that aside, the performances were robust and on top of the comedy and pathos and Papademetriou seems to have managed to corral a headstrong and wayward bunch! Aside from a night of fun and fine roles for women (not that common) the production also offers the opportunity to experience the work of a playwright who would not otherwise be known here, memory being the sieve-like thing it is.
