Tiffanys Revisited

The U.S. theater, known as the fabulous invalid for generations, was in a particularly palsied state in the 1840s. Sniffed a young Brooklyn Eagle critic named Walt Whitman: "Bad taste carries the day with hardly a pleasant point to mitigate its coarseness." New York's Park Theater, for one, was fast approaching the day when patrons sat on bare benches, watching rats fight the actors for stage center.

In this atmosphere arrived an unlikely heroine: a strong-jawed, 26-year-old matron named Anna Cora Mowatt. Anna's lawyer-husband had broken down physically and financially, and Anna blithely set out to recoup by writing a play. Fashion, her maiden effort, ran a respectable string of performances at the Park in 1845, and launched Author Mowatt on a heady career as an actress. It also gave the U.S. its first home-grown play of any success.

At Manhattan's off-Broadway Royal Playhouse, Anna's little breadwinner is on the boards again, in its first New York revival since 1924. With riotous good faith and not the hint of a blush, Fashion trots out the family Tiffany, a nouveau riche clan headed by a mother given to haughty generalizations on the conduct of the "ee-light" and a father whose financial eminence is largely due to his skill at forgery. The Tiffanys hope to marry their daughter off to a French count, who. of course, turns out to be bogus; the Tiffanys' unprepossessing servant girl emerges as the daughter of Adam Trueman. a bewhiskered. cane-thumping farmer of great wealth and rectitude.

Half the plot is carried forward through asides ("Had I but known this maiden's true station . . ."), and when the stage crew needs time to shift scenery, the present production throws in an irrelevant song. All in all, the revival proves that passable 19th century satire can make for delightful 20th century farce.

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