"The Silver Cord"

“The Silver Cord” (now through July 14^th at the Peccadillo Theatre Company)

 Caroline Kaplan and Wilson Bridges

 

Sidney Howard’s 1926 play “The Silver Cord” is not remembered as an endearing old warhorse of a play, but its leading character Mrs. Phelps is unquestionably an armor-plated warhorse when it comes to fending off the two women who would dare come between her and her two sons. In the Peccadillo Theatre production this nearly clichéd mother from hell is played in drag by actor Dale Carman who is here repeating the role he played for the same company in 1995. Whether or not he has brought additional nuance to his characterization isn’t for me to say as I didn’t see it. But based on Carman’s amusing, stiff-necked, autocratic posturing and posing, the play happily doesn’t descend into camp. It is a solidly written bit of claptrap about the lengths that Mrs. Phelps will go to secure her future and keep the taut bond she has secured with her sons.

The older son David (Thomas Matthew Kelley), an architect, has just returned to the stately family home in some eastern American city with Christina (Victoria Mack) a biologist whom he met and wed while studying and working abroad. They are welcomed by mother dearest with a somewhat tempered display of disapproval…soon to increase in its intensity when she learns of their plans to reside in New York City. The younger son Robert (Wilson Bridges) is conspicuously an unredeemable momma’s boy despite his being engaged to the rather charming Hester (Caroline Kaplan) to whom Mrs. Phelps is even more openly hostile.

Under the embracing direction of Dan Ackerman, the play courses briskly through events that mark Mrs. Phelps as a ruthless, domineering manipulator and her sons as a pair of lily-livered specimens of manhood. The upshot is that any rebellion on the parts of David and Robert to stand up for themselves and for the women they presume to love leaves them conflicted, emotionally crippled, and with feelings of guilt. The out-come is predictable, but there is fun watching Mrs. Phelps muster up her wits to carry out some rather despicably contrived machinations in order to keep at least one of her boys tied to her and secure her tomorrow as just another day.

Carman is to be commended for the way he segues from a fiercely obsessive love for her sons to sashaying around her female adversaries in high dudgeon. Kaplan is excellent as the viciously victimized Hester as is Mack as the not-so-easily duped Christina. Both Kelly as the completely blind-sided David and Bridges as the perilously wimpy son are defined by having been raised by (dare I say it) an incestuously motivated mother. Set designer Harry Finer spared no imagination in the use of musty post-Victorian décor. The play may also be a bit musty, but it deserves praise and consideration for being in the canon of a playwright who received the Pulitzer Prize in 1925 for “They Knew What They Wanted” (made into the successful musical “The Most Happy Fella”). Howard also wrote (most of) the screen-play for “Gone with the Wind,” about another self-centered woman who could assure herself that “Tomorrow is another day.”

“The Silver Cord”

Peccadillo Theatre Company, Theatre at St. Clement's, 423 West 46th Street

For tickets ($55.00) call 212-352-3101