EMILY
at Ruggles Cabaret
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By all rights, these should be very shallow, unpleasant people; but playwright Stephen Metcalfe is acutely aware that little in life is simple. He’s created his characters with a surprisingly compassionate maturity and sensitivity. Although Emily’s broker buddies are as obnoxious a pack of dead-end kids as any female has ever been forced to fraternize with, they loyally proffer advice and assistance to the lady when she’s in distress, though it’s along the lines of: “Tell him the truth. You’ll lose him sooner that way.” Her friend Hallie, though obsessed with her own imminent reproductive obsolescence, observes wisely, “We’re all so damn busy proving how wonderful we are, we don’t leave ourselves time to think or doubt.” Even Emily’s penthouse-dwelling, champagne-swilling mother has some good insights, reminding her that marriage and children are no insurance against unhappiness: “I see the ones who hung on, raised the children, gave the dinner parties, cleaned up the dog shit–dumped, divorced. Left for smoother skin and higher bosoms. Left with large houses and a membership at the club . . . I’ll still be dissatisfied, but I’ll count my blessings . . . and answer to no one but myself.”
Emily is a fable for our times, and like most such tales, it’s populated by broadly drawn archetypes. Since archetypes can easily degenerate into stereotypes, and familiar wisdom into soap-opera cliche, the entire cast is to be commended for giving their characters such conviction and depth as to make us consider their sentiments as if we were hearing them for the first time. “You can’t count on love, but you know where you stand with money” is no less valid for being spoken by a drunken boor in Brooks Brothers. And the statement that “when I wanted to marry you, I wasn’t saying I was going to love you the rest of my life. I was saying that I choose to try. . . . Maybe we fail, but what else is there?” isn’t any less true for coming from the mouth of a 20th-century noble savage.
There aren’t many people left who remember vaudeville–or its British counterpart, the music-hall concert. The numerous variety shows that had toured the United States since the 1880s by 1930 were almost completely eclipsed by radio and motion pictures, though many of the performers went on to become stars in these new forums. (In fact, The Ed Sullivan Show might be called the last of the vaudevilles, and it played until mid-1971.) If you remember anything of George Burns and Gracie Allen, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby–or in the British wing, Stanley Holloway and Harry Secombe down through Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and even Monty Python–then you have an idea of what vaudeville was and is. “Something for the whole family” was the motto of this popular entertainment in its heyday, the first three decades of this century. It was made up of a variety of acts, primarily comedic, frequently satirical, and often included songs and dances, possibly card tricks or trained animals, and maybe some “serious culture” in the form of an aria or a poem or two.
