Fated To Be Dated

I heard an audience member say it at the end of the first act and then another say it at the end of the second: “It’s awfully dated, isn’t it?” This happened when I caught the Peccadillo Theater Company’s The Ladies of the Corridor, an excellent production.

Given that Dorothy Parker and Arnaud d’Usseau’s play about unhappy women living in a Manhattan hotel first showed its face 52 long years ago, it’d almost have to be dated, wouldn’t it? Ah, but you rebut, take the plays of Molière. They’ll always be topical because they deal with foibles that people will have now and forever: stinginess, hypochondria, social climbing, hypocrisy, and plenty more. Granted, most of Molière’s plays are classics and should be respected as such. This, however, shouldn’t mean that we can’t enjoy an old play that isn’t a classic.

Watching a play from way back when is the closest thing we have to a time machine. Each of them allows us the opportunity to return to those days of yesteryear. By definition, history is dated, isn’t it? But we study it to learn. We can learn something by checking out old plays, as well. Want to know what life was like in 1953 and what was on people’s minds back then? See Ladies of the Corridor.

When Brigadoon opened in 1947, there was a scene where Tommy, from contemporary Manhattan, gives a current U.S. coin to a milk seller. The Brigadoonian is so consternated by this unfamiliar item that Tommy’s pal Jeff blithely asks,”What did you give him, a hunk of uranium?” Is that line dated now? Sure, but I love that it shows us just how hot a topic uranium must have been in the post-war years for Alan Jay Lerner to make a point of it. In 1980, when a new production of Brigadoon was being readied for Broadway, Lerner knew that the line in question would sound odd to audiences, so he changed it to “What did you give him, a Susan B. Anthony dollar?” Now thatline is dated — but it does tell us something about that era when people were fumbling with those curious coins, which they often mistook for quarters.

I wouldn’t give an Oscar or even a Golden Globe to any aspect of the film versions of Sunday in New York or Under the Yum Yum Tree, but I always find myself watching them when they show up on TV. In each, the main female character has the same conundrum: Should she sleep with a man before she’s married to him? That question isn’t what it used to be, but these films were both made in 1963, when the birth control pill was not yet popular and — believe it or not, young ‘uns! — condoms were stored surreptitiously out of view in drugstores. More to the point, young women then feared loss of reputation as much as pregnancy. How much did they fear it? Take a look at Sunday in New York and Under the Yum-Yum Tree when they next show up on your TV screen, and note how innocent those pre-AIDS times were.

Any “dated” play must have affected its audiences before it was dated. Ladies of the Corridor has a riveting scene in which a woman implies that she’s going to tell a school principal that his current applicant is homosexual and, therefore, shouldn’t be around young boys. What makes the scene startling is that the woman is the applicant’s mother. Why she does this is very well handled by Parker and d’Usseau, yet the scene still startles. Just think how shocking it had to have been 52 long years ago, when The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name wasn’t even whispered in polite society — and just imagine what it must have been like to be in the audience at the Longacre that year. The average theatergoer must have flinched at the force of this scene and quickly turned to his companion with an astonished look on his face. Imagining its power way back when makes the scene work even better for me.

In two ways, Ladies also serves to remind us how far we’ve come since 1953. The play suggests that, for a woman, friendship with another woman is a last resort only to be taken when she can’t find a man. I do believe that women today far more treasure their friendships with their girlfriends than their mothers and grandmothers did. Secondly, Ladies proposes that women might be happier if they didn’t count on being supported by men, that they’d feel better about themselves if they worked, paid their own way, and had the satisfaction of a job well done. I sat there thinking how so many women in the ensuing decades have learned just that.

All those flicks that we see on Turner Classic Movies are “dated,” but they’re still being aired and people still watch them. Why shouldn’t they? We like it when costumes are made to perfectly replicate the style and look of an era, so why do we resent it when the dialogue and theme of a work does the same? Give me the chance to see a dated play and I’ll say, “It’s a date!”

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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@theatermania.com]