The Gentleman Dancing-Master

Restoration playwright William Wycherley was heartily welcomed at Charles II’s court, where he and the dolled-up monarch shared quality time with Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland. But Wycherley’s good company hardly guaranteed that his plays would be successful. Indeed, his 1672 play The Gentleman Dancing-Master, which is being revived by the Pearl Theater Company, has been feather-dusted off very infrequently in the 333 intervening years. So the folks at the Pearl are owed thanks for demonstrating that, while the piece isn’t in the same league as Wycherley’s 1675 hit The Country Wife in terms of inspiration and execution, it still has its share of delights.

Moreover, a case could be made for The Gentleman Dancing-Master being a warm-up to the later work. The play’s heroine is Hippolita (Marsha Stephanie Blake), who’s every bit as wily at age 14 as the somewhat older country wife Margery. The girl has been betrothed by her father, James Formal (Dan Daily), to Mr. Paris (Sean McNall). However, Paris is trying everyone’s patience because, after having spent three months in the city after which he’s named, he has returned to swinging late 17th-century London seeming more French than the French; among other things, he has taken to wearing frilly pink Paris styles of the sort that only John Galliano would send down a runway today. This brands him a sap to the savvy Hippolita, as does the fact that he now speaks with a plummy accent. In fact, Hippolita thinks Monsieur de Paris (as he now calls himself) is nowhere near as attractive as the roguish Mr. Gerrard (Bradford Cover).

Having contrived to bring Mr. Gerrard into her home just as her father returns from Spain, where he’s become the muy Spanish Don Diego, Hippolita decides to introduce the visitor as a dancing-master — this despite the fact that he is a stranger to terpsichore. The ensuing action follows her eventually triumphant plan to dismiss Paris from her future and install Gerrard. She’s undeterred by her father’s and her suitor’s silliness or the interference of others jamming the household: the suspicious Mrs. Caution (Robin Leslie Brown), the bawds Mrs. Flirt (Rachel Botchan) and Mrs. Flounce (Heather Girardi), and a parson (Ryland Blackinton).

A Puritan with a flare for the im-Puritan, Wycherley was clearly amused and alarmed at what was taking place in post-Cromwell England. There’s nothing, you see, like the abrupt end of repression to cause excessive behavior. M. de Paris’s taking on French airs and Mr. Formal’s assumption of ways Spanish must represent a trend of the 1670s with which we’re not very familiar today: the pretense of being anything but English. At one hilarious moment in the play, Don Diego rails against the English malady of affectation even though he is every inch as affected in Spanish hose as M. de Paris is in pink pantaloons. (The laugh-getting costumes are by Devon Painter.) More than once, Wycherley has a fool exclaim, “That people should be made such fools of!” There’s no mistaking that, for him, London had become a fool’s haven where a 14-year-old could easily get her saucy way and be appealing in the process.

Or somewhat appealing, in this case. The Pearl Theatre Company has provided a service in calling attention to The Gentleman Dancing-Master but has only done a so-so job of mounting the neglected piece. It goes without saying that any Wycherley play, whether acclaimed or not, demands a stylish turn; but director Gus Kaikkonen has trouble delivering as much with any consistency. For one thing, the sequence in which the dancing-master is asked to show his mettle ought to be cleverly staged, but it isn’t.

And what’s with Susan Zeeman Rogers’s set? Taking pride of place upstage throughout most of the action is a bed, indicating that all the chicanery occurs in Hippolita’s chamber. But would any 14-year-old, no matter how liberated she declares herself to be, entertain in such a hussy’s manner? Not likely! (Nor would the touchy Don Diego sanction said behavior by his daughter.)

Another problem with the production is that too much of the supporting players’ activities come off as unpolished. Raucous behavior, such as the appearances of the Mrs. Flounce and Flirt, must be more than raucous on stage, but Girardi and Botchan don’t comply; nor does Brown as Mrs. Caution. On the plus side, Daily as Don Diego speaks with a Castillian accent so heavy that it droops, thereby taking full advantage of his opportunity; McNall, with his French mannerisms, does no less as M. de Paris. The high point of this Gentleman Dancing-Master is the scene in which these two affected parties tangle over the subject of acceptable dress. Here Wycherley, Kaikkonen, Daily, and McNall prove what fools these mortals –and these morals — be.