Minimum-Wage Worker Goes Wild On 15-Grand Inheritance.

If this sounds like the log-line for an upcoming Emma Stone romcom, think again. Playwright Cicely Hamilton came up with this one way back in 1908 when she wrote Diana Of Dobson’s, a largely forgotten frothy romp with feminist teeth now being given a splendiferous 21st-century Antaeus Theatre Company revival.

A sensational Abigail Marks commands the stage as 28-year-old Dobson’s Department Store worker Diana Massingberg, left these past half-dozen years to fend for herself following the death of her country doctor father, which in Edwardian England meant grueling fourteen-hour work days six days a week with no hope whatsoever of future advancement.

Then comes the letter announcing a surprise £300 inheritance (worth about $15,000 in today’s currency) and Diana has an announcement to make to her fellow dormitory drones.

Rather than do the sensible thing and invest her windfall (for a yearly ten-pound interest, a measly $500 a year in 2019 terms), Diana decides to splurge on a one-month Swiss resort vacation during which she’ll pretend to be a young widow with a yearly income of £36,000 (a whopping $200,000 a year today), in other words, more than enough annual funds to turn Diana into a fortune-hunter’s dream.

Enter relatively strapped-for-cash Captain Victor Bretherton (John Bobek) and the stage is set for a romcom of errors that would have done Downton Abbey proud had Julian Fellowes thought of it first.

Feminist suffragist playwright Hamilton may have achieved only the tiniest fraction of her friend and fellow dramatist George Bernard Shaw’s fame and fortune, but like Shaw’s best, Diana Of Dobson’s tackles serious social issues with love and laughs.

Simply put, Diana Of Dobson’s is a largely undiscovered gem that more than merits a spot on Antaeus’s particularly eclectic 2018-19 season, especially as directed by Casey Stangl with abundant verve and stylistic panache.

In roles originally intended to be shared Antaeus-style with a partner, Marks and Bobek take full advantage of their almost unprecedented solo status, guaranteeing audiences two of the year’s most delicious performances, regardless of which otherwise partner-cast ensemble you choose to see.

Like Melissa McCarthy and Amy Schumer on the big screen, the extraordinary Marks not only redefines what it is to be a romantic lead, she burns up the Antaeus stage with her fiery, fabulous star turn as a woman whose financial freedom, however temporary, gives her the power to be all she wants to be in a society that defines her by her gender, social status, and yearly income.

Bobek breaks out of best-friend featured roles to prove himself the most charming and likable of leading men, an initially foolish fop who proves himself unexpectedly open to seeing the beauty within.

Partner casting of physical opposites like Lynn Milgrim and Elyse Mirto (as society matron Mrs. Whyte Fraser and a down-on-her-luck Old Woman), Tony Amendola and John Apicella (as prosperous clothier Sir Jabez Grinley, for whom the term “living wage” is the dirtiest of words), and Ben Atkinson and Paul Stanko (first as a hotel waiter, then as a police constable with a heart of gold) makes a repeat visit well worth considering, and though Rhonda Aldrich and Eve Gordon are perhaps more likely than the others to find themselves called in for the same role, it’s a pleasure to see the two Antaeus treasures add their own shadings to crabapple Dobson’s supervisor Miss Pringle and high society dame Mrs. Cantelupe.

Dialect coach Nike Doukas ensures a mostly authentic-sounding assortment of UK accents most noticeable in Diana’s eclectic band of female, dorm-inhabiting coworkers, the all-around splendid Desirée Mee Jung and Kristen Ariza (Miss Smithers), Erin Barnes and Cindy Nguyen (Kitty Brant), Kendra Chell and Krystel Roche (Miss Jay), and Jazzlyn K. Luckett and Shannon Lee Clair (Miss Morton), who not only give us eight distinctive young women cast with attention to racial diversity but double as robotic hotel maids with an amusingly uncanny knack for anticipating guests’ every need.

Clever doesn’t begin to describe Nina Caussa’s triple-punch set, whose industrial-stark first act dormitory gets transformed into an elegant Swiss hotel with the most ingenious use of slipcovers I’ve ever seen, then returns to its initial severity as the most uninviting of Thames embankments imaginable.

Add to that A. Jeffrey Schoenberg’s superbly detailed upstairs-downstairs Edwardian costumes (and Jessica Mills’s matching wigs), Katie Iannitello’s mutitudious props, Karyn D. Lawrence’s striking lighting, and Jeff Gardner’s jaunty sound and you’ve got a particularly memorable Antaeus production design.

Rachel Berney Needleman is assistant director/dramaturg. Heather Gonzalez is production stage manager and Jessica Osorio is assistant stage manager. Jung is movement coordinator.

Following nearly a hundred years of obscurity, a couple of 21st-century revivals (The Mint’s in 2001 and The New Vic’s in 2016) have revived interest in Cicely Hamilton’s unsung treasure. (A Chicago theater even updated Dobson’s into a contemporary sports bar a few years back.)

The Antaeus Theatre Company retains Diana Of Dobson’s Edwardian setting, but the paycheck-to-paycheck lives Hamilton examined and the injustices she exposed are as relevant in 2019 as they were back in 1908. Rarely has a 111-year-old play seemed so fresh and alive and young and worth rediscovering.

Kiki & David Gindler Performing Arts Center, 110 East Broadway, Glendale.
www.Antaeus.org

–Steven Stanley
April 18 and 19, 2019
Photos: Geoffrey Wade Photography

Tags: Cicely Hamilton, Los Angeles Theater Review, The Antaeus Company