A Taste of Honey
Written by Shelagh Delaney
Directed by Jeremy Wechsler
At the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago
Produced by Shattered Globe Theatre
A review of the performance on June 14, 2008
This play was the 18-year-old author's venture into subjects rare on the stage of the 1950s, if not altogether absent from it: the struggles of low-income families, child abuse, gender roles, interracial love, homosexuality, and out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Surprisingly insightful from someone so young, A Taste of Honey tells the story of Jo, a 17-year-old girl who lives in Manchester, England, with her mother, Helen, a coarse woman who might be said to flout propriety at every opportunity. In line with her personality, Helen abandons Jo to take a young lover, Peter. Jo enters into a romance with a young black sailor she meets at school; he proposes marriage, to Helen's mocking disapproval, and leaves her pregnant as he goes to sea. Jo's friend Geof, a homosexual young man, moves in with her and accepts the responsibilities of father-to-be until Helen returns.
Linda Reiter's Helen was just unpredictable enough to be aggravating. She wasn't reliably narcissistic or irresponsible; on the contrary, she was realistically inconsistent in thought and action, although throughout her tattered ethos ran a vague sense of maternal duty. It was hard to identify the origin of that duty, be it a forty-year inculcation of social expectations or a genuine, albeit hardly compelling, concern for Jo's welfare. Nevertheless, Reiter did buy her character a chance at redemption through some infrequent, though unmistakable, moments of tenderness, rendered even brighter by the dark backdrop of Helen's callousness, cynicism, and hedonism.
Reiter might have chosen to play more to the stereotype of a low-income single mother whose hopelessness and indignation are made worse by her alcoholism. Rather, Reiter chose only to flirt with the stereotype, drawing back right before reaching the point of no return, i.e., the point at which I'd have rolled my eyes at the triteness. Reiter skillfully teased us with the possibility of an ordinary dysfunctional mother, complete with histrionics, but she delivered instead someone a good deal more interesting: detestable yet somehow likable, selfish but not unfamiliar with compassion, crude but with a modicum of savoir-faire.
In the role of Jo, Helen Sadler was only a little less confident, less fluent, than Reiter. Nevertheless, somewhat like Reiter, Sadler directed her character away from the stereotype. Sadler's Jo was struggling to grow up while defending herself against her mother's frequent harshness and occasional vitriol and while learning to make life decisions without the benefit of seasoned advice from parents or mentors. Accordingly, she was sometimes tentative, sometimes assertive; sometimes resentful, sometimes forgiving. Sadler gave Jo youthfulness, color, sympathy, and impetuousness.
Unfortunately, the three male characters didn't sparkle like their female counterparts. The most disappointing was Peter, played by Jeremy van Meter, who was either uncertain in the role or unsuited for it. van Meter's reactions on stage were awkward and inappropriately abrupt, creating the impression that he hadn't settled on an interpretation of the role. Moreover, his unsteady accent was distracting, being sometimes a bad attempt at something British and at other times a respectable American southern drawl.
Kevin Viol's Geof was noble but cautious, and he brought out the sensitivity this character needs to win the audience's respect and to give context to his relationship with Jo. This Geof had a bearing that matched his circumstances, although Viol inadvertently played the role such that Geof always seemed to know his next line and was waiting impatiently to deliver it. Consequently, Viol spoke so fast that his words sometimes disappeared into the ether between his mouth and the audience's ears, a shortcoming that also afflicted Bryson Engelen in the part of Jo's love interest (identified as "the Boy"). Although Engelen had an endearing persona on stage, his acting had the uncomfortable feeling of being over-rehearsed at best and forced at worst.
Despite the quality of the script, its wit, cohesiveness, and acumen, there's one particular moment in the play that puzzles me by its incongruity. Jo's revelation to Helen about the baby's ethnic heritage is almost a throwaway line, inserted as comic relief after a long and heavy emotional exchange. Coming at the end of the play, it doesn't serve to develop any of the characters; it merely gives Helen a chance to punctuate her self-pity as the grandmother-to-be who's about to sacrifice her libertine lifestyle for the sake of her daughter. "Miscegenation", as it was called, was a very divisive issue in the 1950s, and its glib dismissal here leads me to wonder whether Delaney was trying to make a point by treating the question so inharmoniously.