Time and the Conways

[foxy]

Written in 1937 by J.B. Priestley tells the story of a well-to-do middle class family in England right after WWI. The occasion is a party for the 21st birthday of one of the daughters. It’s a family of 3 daughters and 2 sons all of which appear to have bright futures ahead of them. The mother who is something of a snob is played by Elizabeth McGovern of Downton Abbey fame. She’s not nearly as nice as she is in that show.

The play starts in 1919 during the party. Two other characters make an appearance, the family solicitor and a young man of a lower class whose treated badly by the family.

The second act takes place in 1937 in the same drawing room with all of the characters whose lives have now taken very different roads.

The last part of the play returns to 1919 and here it becomes somewhat mystical. J.B. Priestley was fascinated with theories of time and space inspired by the writings of John William Dunne who believed time was not a series of linear events. All this is too complicated for me to explain here so if you’re interested in this subject you’ll have to do some googling on your own.

I found the play captivating even without this element of time travel. Great cast including one Anna Baryshnikov whose father you may have heard of. Elizabeth McGovern is also a singer/songwriter and has just recorded her 4th album. The band she fronts is Sadie and the Hotheads. Curious I’m going to look for some of her music now.

[edjames]

Sorry, I disagree with your assessment of this boring, and tedious production. Friends and I agree it was not worth the effort. I was completely bored by the storyline of these privledged and pampered aristocrats who deserved to be put into financial ruin and personal crisis.

A friend went to a recent Saturday night performance and Elizabeth McGovern was out ill and the show was cancelled.

Discounted seats are always available on TDF and TKTS. It not a hit.

[edjames]

NYTimes called it "tedious." I couldn't agree more.

 

Review: The Future Is Always Present in ‘Time and the Conways’

TIME AND THE CONWAYS

 

By JESSE GREEN OCT. 10, 2017

• As its title suggests, J. B. Priestley’s “Time and the Conways,” now being revived on Broadway by the Roundabout Theater Company, concerns the workings of the cosmos and the workings of a family.
   
  We get to know the family better.
   
  Gathered in a suburban Yorkshire villa in 1919, the Conways are a flourishing clan: a well-off widow in her mid-40s with four daughters and two sons, age 16 to 26. They have just come through World War I with most of their unexamined class assumptions intact and thus all the riper for lancing. This the play proceeds to do with the methodical mercilessness of a facialist.
   
  That’s where the time part of the title comes in. The outer two acts of the drama take place at a party celebrating the 21st birthday of daughter Kay, a literary type, as the family prepares to entertain guests with a jolly game of charades. (Jolly for them, that is; tedious for us.) The evening also welcomes the second son, Robin, home from the war and introduces us to outsiders who will later become important.
   
  The inner act — set in 1937, when the play had its London premiere — shows us the “later,” and a miserable later it is; all the bright hopes established in 1919 have been snuffed out.
   
  One child has grown into a lush, one a scold; one’s stuck in a terrifying marriage, one has failed to launch; one is successful but unfulfilled (that’s Kay) and one fares even worse. Still, to the improvident, narcissistic widow, the worst of the damage is that she can no longer afford her home. The family gathers in the same room as before, again on Kay’s birthday, to find a solution to what time has made of them.
  

Though the Roundabout production, which opened on Tuesday evening, stars Elizabeth McGovern as the materfamilias, the story really is Kay’s. (She is played well, if with an overly neurotic edge, by Charlotte Parry.) It is Kay who mediates the two halves of the title. During the 1919 scenes she is occasionally stopped in her tracks by presentiments of what’s in store around the corner. It may even be that the 1937 scene is merely her dream — or nightmare.

 

For us it is a bit of both. Parts of “Time and the Conways” come off as obvious exercises in dramatic irony, as tedious as those charades. Other parts look at the world as it really is and are freshly gripping.

 

So give credit to the Roundabout for producing this thoughtful revival of an ambitious, vexing, multilayered drama. Still, there’s a reason it has not appeared on Broadway since its 1938 American premiere. Too often it feels like an elaborate mechanism for deploying once-fashionable cosmological ideas.

 

Photo

Some of the Conway siblings in happier times, from left, Anna Baryshnikov, Charlotte Parry, Matthew James Thomas and Anna Camp in the Roundabout Theater

Influenced by the popular philosopher J. W. Dunne, and particularly his 1927 treatise “An Experiment With Time,” Priestley sought a dramatic structure that would demonstrate the idea that all parts of our lives occur simultaneously, even if we usually see only the current “cross section.” If we could instead grasp the whole thing, he argues, or at least have faith that it exists, we might stop acting as if “we were all in a panic on a sinking ship.”

 

The argument is flaky. Worse, it isn’t convincing on the play’s own terms. The evidence Priestley presents in the 1937 scene in no way bears out the belief expounded by placid Alan (Gabriel Ebert) that time is a “dream” moving us safely “from one peephole to the next.” Rather, the plot seems to support Kay’s view of time as “a great devil in the universe,” ruining everything indiscriminately.

 

Rebecca Taichman’s lovely staging does what it can visually to correct, or at least finesse, this problem. The simple morning-room set by Neil Patel performs a terrific bit of symbolic reconfiguration to accommodate the play’s porous sense of time, and Ms. Taichman, a recent Tony winner for “Indecent,” does haunting things with the characters who briefly step beyond time altogether. The costumes, lighting, wigs and makeup — and especially Matt Hubbs’s sound design and the original music by Dustin O’Halloran — also contribute to a vision that is almost brutally nostalgic.

 

And yet all this loving attention to the play’s philosophical superstructure does little to alleviate the stiffness of the actual scenes, which are filled with the kind of canned dialogue and bald exposition that Monty Python and other English satirists would come to savage a few decades later.

 

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the performances — including that of Ms. McGovern, who lately played a mother of similar vintage but more anodyne personality on “Downton Abbey” — are often overstated. That the problem affects both newcomers like Cara Ricketts, a Stratford Festival find, and New York stage regulars like Anna Camp, suggests direction that aims to score points and then rescore them as if in doubt of the audience’s comprehension.

 

When, for instance, in the 1919 scenes, a romantic opportunity is scotched or a guest insulted, the action is heavily underlined to make sure that the consequences in 1937 will line up. They would have anyway.

 

Priestley and the production are working too hard; he would be more successful integrating plot and metaphysics in his other so-called Time Plays, especially “An Inspector Calls,” revived on Broadway to great acclaim in 1994. But even in “Time and the Conways” he is more than a philosophical faddist and domestic dramatist: He is an astute social critic.

 

When the revival focuses on that, it achieves its greatest depth. The interval from 1919 to 1937 was, after all, unkind to more than the Conways; it was unkind to all of England. The chance to remake the country into a fairer one, in which social stratification and wealth inequality might be mitigated, was squandered, and by the time the Depression (which the British called The Great Slump) arrived, the middle and working classes were enemies instead of comrades. Even as one of the Conway children bemoans the situation, another helps break a railwaymen’s strike — and finds doing so “a great lark.”

 

Priestley connects this chaotic brew of entitlement and resentment to the rise of Nazism elsewhere in Europe. It’s no accident that it’s the gauche Mr. Beevers, a despised outsider with the wrong accent, who grimly explains to the impoverished Conways that their cavalier assumptions of privilege are now worthless. They no longer live at the end of the old war, he tells them, but “just before the next” one.

 

It’s a terrifying comment, especially as delivered by Steven Boyer, the “Hand to God” star unrecognizable here as a distinctly Bannonesque spoiler. However outlandish Priestley’s ideas about time, he totally nailed a future truth in his creation of this furiously vengeful arriviste bully. What Priestley wants you to understand in “Time and the Conways” is that such men are not the creators of rotten societies. Rather, they are the product.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

Anna Camp is a brilliant comedian, but she can't help save this TEDIOUS show

[+ WilliamM]

......personally I prefer to read what posters on this site think themselves without simply cut and pasting other reviews.

 

I do not agree. Even though I have the Times delivered everyday, sometimes I'm vague on when shows are opening. I live in Philadelphia, not New York. I was greatly pleased to read the Times review here this morning.

[actor61]

Anna Camp is a brilliant comedian, but she can't help save this TEDIOUS show

Does anyone remember when Priestley's play "An Inspector Calls" was such a hit in a Broadway revival a number of years ago? It was the most boring evening I've ever spent in a theatre. I can't imagine this production of one of his works is any more scintillating. I'll give it a miss, I think.

[+ WilliamM]

I do not remember much about "An Inspector Calls" except Maxwell Caulfield and the elaborate trick scenery. I enjoyed it a lot, but frankly under valued the play for the first half hour.