TIME OUT NEW YORK
THE SKIN GAME
ROBERT SIMONSON
July 14-20, 2005
“Good stories well told” is the Mint Theater Company’s motto, and it once again makes good on that idea with its production of John Galsworthy’s “The Skin Game”, a 1920 social drama that packs the wallop of a meaty melodrama, ranging over a menu of blackmail, class warfare, adultery and attempted suicide.
“Good stories well told” is the Mint Theater Company’s motto, and it once again makes good on that idea with its production of John Galsworthy’s “The Skin Game”, a 1920 social drama that packs the wallop of a meaty melodrama, ranging over a menu of blackmail, class warfare, adultery and attempted suicide.
The English Galsworthy (1867- 1933), a child of the upper middle class, was interested in how money and status consign people to different worlds. Thus, The Skin Game’s question is the same one E.M. Forster addressed in Howards End: Who is better suited to inherit the world—the principled but snobbish aristocracy, or the industrious but brutish nouveau riche? Here, the former is represented by the centuries-old Hillcrist clan. Their privileged lifestyle is threatened by the Hornblowers, north-country parvenus who intend to build a smoke-belching factory in sight of the blue bloody ancestral home. Cornered, the Hillcrists quickly shake off their pose of dignified reserve in favor of bare- knuckled extortion.
Director Eleanor Reissa infuses the proceedings with surprising vitality, and the uniformly excellent cast keeps the energy up throughout. John C. Vennema flounders piteously as an aristocrat in moral distress. Stephen Rowe uses his characteristic skin-crawling oiliness to great effect as Vennema’s devious lawyer. Diana LaMar brings acute feeling to the role of a pawn used by both sides. Best of all, however, is James Gale’s zestfully coarse Mr. Hornblower. All benefit from the expert dialect coaching of Amy Stoller, who ensures that everybody lends the correct voices to the diverse viewpoints supplied by Galsworthy.