THE RIVALS REVISITED
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Kane plays Beverly Absolute, the bold and mischievous daughter of irascible Sir Anthony Absolute. Beverly poses as her absent brother Jack, an army captain, in order to elope with her beloved Lydia Languish. The nearsighted Sir Anthony’s plans for his son’s wedding are shared by Lydia’s dotty guardian aunt, Mrs. Malaprop; all Beverly has to do is dress up as Jack, lower her voice an octave, and walk off with the bride without anyone realizing they’ve just witnessed a lesbian wedding. But things get complicated thanks to Lydia’s well-meaning cousin, a dizzy dominatrix named Julia Melville whose passionate demonstrations toward Beverly, Lydia, and Lydia’s servant Lucy mark her as a serial-monogamy lesbian (she wants ’em all, but one at a time). Not knowing that Beverly and “Jack” are one and the same, Julia arranges for “Jack” to fight a duel against Lydia’s other suitor, Squire Bob Acres, setting the stage for an inevitable revelation of Beverly’s deception.
This plot represents considerable reworking of its source, in which wealthy Captain Jack Absolute poses as his subordinate officer, Ensign Beverly, to woo Lydia–who’s sentimentally predisposed to fall in love with a poor man rather than a rich one. It’s a notion she’s picked up from romantic novels; one of Sheridan’s running jokes concerns whether it’s good for women to be educated, and The Rivals Revisited carries the joke through by having Lydia feast on such books as Odd Girl Out and Return to Lesbos.
Less successful are Maggie Speer, whose Mrs. Malaprop is visually fine (she seems to have stepped straight out of a Joshua Reynolds painting) but lacking in the high-flown pretensions that make her mangling of the English language so funny, and Pam Wesselmann as Julia, saddled with lots of business (including a riding-crop bondage bit) that she seems not at all comfortable with. But in the scenes with Kane, even these flawed performances take on a confidence and clarity that serve The Rivals Revisited as well as they would The Rivals played, so to speak, straight.
