The Eisenhower Decade Is Back, at Least Onstage
IN various pockets of the fashion and design worlds, the years of the new millennium have been characterized by a return to the visual language of the 1950s. We have seen the arch-frump style of Prada, the housewife-at-the-country-club dresses from various American designers, the pink KitchenAid mixers that might have come from the cabinets of Ozzie and Harriet. Sometimes the take has been wistful, sometimes cheeky. Often the players involved hope to call our attention to some of the more insidious aspects of midcentury social and cultural conformism.
Some of the same factors are responsible for one important trend of the new theater season: revivals of ’50s plays. The trend reaches beyond Broadway, where “Inherit the Wind,” the fictionalized account of the Scopes trial, is to open April 12. (The original 1955 production won Paul Muni a Tony Award and showcased a young Tony Randall.) The Keen Company, for instance, is mounting its version of “Tea and Sympathy” (opening March 15 at the Clurman Theater at Theater Row), Robert Anderson’s 1953 meditation on masculinity and homophobia set in a Northeastern boarding school.
The latter play (later made into a film with Deborah Kerr, who originated the role of the headmaster’s wife on Broadway), revolves around a 17-year-old boy who isn’t like other boys, which is to say that he doesn’t have much taste for the brutish codes of male behavior upheld by his athletic classmates. Everyone presumes the boy is gay, and leading the brigade of his accusers is the school’s headmaster. The student’s lone defender is the headmaster’s wife, who is too good, too ethereal, too sensitive for the restrictive little world in which she is trapped.
Read entire article at NYT
Some of the same factors are responsible for one important trend of the new theater season: revivals of ’50s plays. The trend reaches beyond Broadway, where “Inherit the Wind,” the fictionalized account of the Scopes trial, is to open April 12. (The original 1955 production won Paul Muni a Tony Award and showcased a young Tony Randall.) The Keen Company, for instance, is mounting its version of “Tea and Sympathy” (opening March 15 at the Clurman Theater at Theater Row), Robert Anderson’s 1953 meditation on masculinity and homophobia set in a Northeastern boarding school.
The latter play (later made into a film with Deborah Kerr, who originated the role of the headmaster’s wife on Broadway), revolves around a 17-year-old boy who isn’t like other boys, which is to say that he doesn’t have much taste for the brutish codes of male behavior upheld by his athletic classmates. Everyone presumes the boy is gay, and leading the brigade of his accusers is the school’s headmaster. The student’s lone defender is the headmaster’s wife, who is too good, too ethereal, too sensitive for the restrictive little world in which she is trapped.