Mint Theater Revives THE LUCKY ONE by A. A. Milne

L-R: Robert David Grant and Ari Brand in THE LUCKY ONE.  Photo by Richard Termine.

A. A. Milne is best remembered as the author of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner but he really was more than just a writer of children’s books.  He also wrote essays, light verse, short stories and novels; he contributed to and was an assistant editor of Punch; and he was a playwright of considerable renown, in England and in the US, with several successes both on Broadway and in London’s West End.

The Lucky One, however, was not one of Milne’s more successful works nor, sad to say, ought it to have been.  It is a rather tired treatment of the age-old conflict between brothers – the golden boy and his less-favored sibling - a story as old as that of Cain and Abel and of Jacob and Esau.  There is also the overlay that perhaps things are not quite what they seem and we really ought to try to see things from the other guy’s perspective, shouldn’t we?  It should come as no surprise then that when The Lucky One was first produced on Broadway in 1922, it closed after only 40 performances.

 

Now the Mint Theater Company, justifiably acclaimed as one of the finest off-Broadway theater companies in the city, has chosen to stage the first ever revival of this play at the Beckett Theater at Theatre Row on West 42nd Street in midtown Manhattan.  Since its founding in 1995, the Mint has been dedicated to the mission of unearthing and producing lost or neglected but worthwhile plays of the past and infusing them with new vitality and over the past two decades, it has staged superb revivals of seldom seen works by playwrights as diverse as Edith Wharton, Thomas Wolfe, D.H. Lawrence, John Galsworthy, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, and Arnold Bennett.

  

Now, from a theatrical standpoint, the Mint has scored another success with its revival of The Lucky One.  The performances, the direction, the set – all are exemplary as we have come to expect from the Mint.  It is only the play itself that is wanting.

The play is the tale of two brothers: Gerald Farrington (Robert David Grant) who is the golden boy, working in the Foreign Service and engaged to be married to the lovely Pamela Carey (Paton Ashbrook) and his older and less-favored sibling, Bob Farrington (Ari Brand) who works as a broker in The City and who is Pamela’s close friend.  The underlying animosity between the brothers only emerges when Bob finds himself in legal trouble and Gerald fails to save him.

The ultimate confrontation between the two has been described in the play’s promotional material as being “as stirring as it is surprising,” but I found it to be neither.  Indeed, I found it all to be much too predictable.

In Twice Times, a children’s poem, Milne wrote about

… Two Little Bears who lived in a Wood,
And one of them was Bad and the other was Good….

…And then quite suddenly (just like Us)
One got Better and the other got Wuss….

…There may be a Moral, though some say not;
I think there's a moral, though I don't know what.
But if one gets better, as the other gets wuss,
These Two Little Bears are just like Us…

.

And in Winnie-the-Pooh, Milne wrote:

On Wednesday, when the sky is blue, 
And I have nothing else to do, 
I sometimes wonder if it's true 
That who is what and what is who.

For my money, these scraps of children’s verse say it all – and in simpler and much more entertaining fashion than does the play.

Which, of course, is not intended to take anything away from the play’s cast.  Both Robert David Grant and Ari Brand were excellent in their roles as the ill-starred brothers as was Paton Ashbrook as Pamela.  And the rest of the company, including Wynn Harmon and Deanne Lorette as the parents; Cynthia Harris as the great-aunt; Peggy J. Scott as Gerald’s old nurse; and Michael Frederic, Andrew Fallaize, and Mia Hutchinson-Shaw as family friends certainly brought as much to their roles as the play’s limitations would allow.

In particular, I would single out for praise Andrew Fallaize, who provided much of the play’s comic relief in his role as Thomas Todd, Gerald’s golf-obsessed friend.

And so my bottom line is this: I really don’t think this play was worth reviving in the first place.  But given that it was, the Mint Theater Company did a fine job of it.