Is Life Worth Living?

Written by Lenox Robinson

Directed by Jonathan Bank

Mint Theater

311 West 43rd Street

212-315-0231

 

Review by Jancy Langley

 

Brooding Hearts: Graham Outerbridge, Leah Curney and Margaret Daly in Lenox Robinson's Is Life Worth Living? (photo: Richard Termine).

 

In a revival of Irish writer Lenox Robinson’s 1933 work, a motley but merry seaside community copes with the great existential question: Is life worth living? Armed only with a tradition of passive pleasantry, the town receives a dark cultural infusion when the De La Mere Repertory Theater Company takes seasonal residence, promising plays that “revolutionize the soul” — Ibsen, Chekhov, Turgenev — and wreak havoc on the townspeople’s previously halcyon hearts.

 

Susan Zeeman Rogers lays a satirically loud, puffy pastel-floral set: the village inn’s parlor, where innkeepers, guests, and the infamous visiting artists float about, returning with news of increasingly disturbed residents as the mockingly gloomy weather howls and thunders outside. The outsized actors, Constance Constantia and Hector De La Mere, dominate the stage from the start, leading the inn’s cast of characters to examine their own personal tragedies piece by piece, while occasionally reenacting the structure of major Russian scenes in Irish brogues with the content of everyday complaints. Instead of lost lovers and the ghosts of children gone, the innkeeper’s sister bemoans her imagined youthful romance, and her nephew soliloquizes on his pained adolescent pinings for the itinerant village accountant.

 

As the season bears on and the rain continues, our joyful Irishmen begin moving from harmless personal melodrama into major manic-depressive episodes. The despair of the situation receives regular comic jabs in the parlor commentary; as suicide attempts continue to fail, the boot notes that “if he’d tried the white rocks, he might’ve had a go of it.”

 

It takes a reporter’s probing and a few clear cases of induced psychosis before the bonny, boozing owner of the inn (the company’s host) puts two and two together: It’s the plays that inspire the misery, confound it! Tension builds and peaks as the townspeople try to decide whether they miss their meaningless, monotonous happiness or whether they have found a new identity in soulful suffering.

 

Robinson’s play reads like a love letter to quotidian Irish character and a lighthearted admonishment to the gravity of Major Theater. If the audience can set aside any personal reverence for Chekhov’s brilliance, Is Life Worth Living? tells a blithe little tale.