REVIEW:GARRY by Sophie Treadwell White Bear Theatre 3rd – 21st June 2019
Emma Zadow • Jun 08, 2019
‘This production is not to be missed for its dedication to Sophie Treadwell and capturing the essence, tone and ambience of the writer’ ★★★★
Sophie Treadwell has always been regarded in the lists of the best American playwrights of the 20th century; her magnum opus, and only play performed, MACHINAL continues to be revived internationally since its first inception in 1928. Despite this, her catalogue of other work has seldom been explored, and here comes one of them at the White Bear in its official world premiere: GARRY. Continuing themes of homosexuality, gender, poverty and the role of women in the American Dream, Garry comes to the stage over 60 years after its publication.
1954. Roy Cohn’s New York. Joseph McCarthy’s America. An unemployed man, Garry (Thomas Martin) and Wilma (Phebe Alys) are a freshly married jazz listening coke-swigging couple living poorly on the Upper West Side. They are frequented by untimely visits by Garry’s sister, a brusque New York prostitute Peggy (Alice Welby) and are just trying to make it work. That is, until Garry is lured from a bar to the hotel room of a “prominent citizen” with the promise of a job. Sexual desire disturbs all three as the event that happens in that hotel room changes the course of each character when a Texan reporter (Matthew Wellard) enquires deeper into the case for the paper.
Alys and Martin crackle on stage as husband and wife churning over each other’s pasts. Purging their past mothers and abusive fathers over whiskey, it’s a Freudian chaos of a marriage. Wellard as reporter Dave Andrews, penetrates the tension most effectively in his scenes with Wilma. Particularly, these two actors sizzle slaking between shots together as simply a girl from Oklahoma and a boy from Texas, trapped and freed, by New York City.
Director Graham Watts works the newly refurbished White Bear to its fullest and with astute character-driven costume by Emma Therese Boomer and thematically charged lighting by Paola Capuano. This production is not to be missed for its dedication to Sophie Treadwell and capturing the essence, tone and ambience of a writer and time lost, but who is nonetheless at the front of our conscience.
Watts and his cast deliver Treadwell’s unperformed play with strength and conviction. It is a play exploring the toxic violence of the American Dream. And those that choose to follow or fight it. Treadwell deserves to be revisited as still one of the great playwrights and is not let down here.
GARRY by Sophie Treadwell
White Bear Theatre 3rd – 21st June 2019
Directed by Graham Watts
Box Office: https://www.whitebeartheatre.co.uk/
Reviewer Emma Zadow is a professional actor and writer having trained at Rose Bruford and Norton Centre of the Arts, Kentucky. She has worked internationally in the USA, Greece, Spain and UK as an actor & theatre maker. She is also a playwright from the Soho Theatre Writers Lab.
@EmmaZadow
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