Two people meet. A spark is struck. Words of love are spoken. After a while, one of them meets and marries someone else. What happens to the first relationship, especially if both parties are still invested in it, albeit to different degrees?
Nonsense and Beauty, now at the Rep Studio, brings the first full production of a drama St. Louis first found last year in the Rep’s Ignite! series. We have a world premiere of this story of E.M. Forster, who was the author of Howard’s End, Passage to India and other novels, and his love for a young policeman whom he met in the 1930’s. The author is Scott C. Sickles.
Not only was homosexuality illegal then, Forster (Jeffrey Hayenga) and Robert Buckingham ((Robbie Simpson) couldn’t even share living quarters. Buckingham, of course, being a policeman was held to a particularly high standard. Buckingham’s marriage to a young nurse tears Forster almost apart.
Much of the tale is told through Forster’s friend J.R. Ackerley (John Feltch), who introduces the two lovers and provides plenty of acerbic commentary. May Buckingham (Lori Vega), Bob’s wife, eventually, sort of, maybe, thinks Morgan – Forster used his middle name – is uncommonly fond of her husband, but that nothing happened. And then there’s Forster’s mother (Donna Weinsting), who’s not as dotty as she seems to let us think.
In some ways, this is not a new story – hidden love is as old as civilization. The close confines of the Studio Theatre make it up close and personal. The contrast between the hesitant, upper-class intellectual who dreams of a loving relationship and the much younger man who is pretty much the epitome of what he’s longed for, including being more forthcoming physically and emotionally, is striking. When Bob Buckingham falls in love with the young nurse, it doesn’t appear, at least in the play, to be a sham. When one loves two people, as someone recently said, you’re drawing from two different accounts.
What Forster and both the Buckinghams make of the situation is the path we follow, and a difficult, winding and rocky one it is. Hayenga’s Forster manages to blend reserve and impetuousness splendidly; Simpson, as Buckingham, is a wonderful fresh-faced young lover; watching him age is fascinating. Perfectly thrown-about banter between Feltch and Havenga is an absolute delight, Feltch being as irresistible as a snake-oil charmer. Weinsting is particularly in her element as a matriarch with a stinger – watch her face as she’s watching her son, for instance, even when she’s not throwing out her barbs and wails. Lori Vega as May Buckingham has as complicated a role as the two men in her life, perhaps more so, and she expands her awareness with considerable subtlety. If we finds her head too far in the sand, we have to remember the time period.
A side note about something in the play. Forster is horrified when he finds that Buckingham is involved with a nurse. The English stereotype of a nurse as being a slattern or alcoholic or woman of ill repute – think Dickens’ Sairey Gamp – was the barrier Florence Nightingale faced as a well-brought-up woman. The idea that it was not a profession into which the right sort of girl entered remained, especially in the upper classes, for several generations after Nightingale established the first non-religious nursing school at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London. Her first graduates began practicing around 1865. [End of infomercial!]
Seth Gordon directed with a careful and sure hand, having directed its first public reading of it more than twenty years ago. His associates in the production are Brian Sidney Bembridge, scenic and lighting designer, Rusty Wandall, sound designer, and Felia K. Davenport, who has a particularly dab hand with the plaid suits which don’t somehow appear overwhelmingly garish.
Who knows where this play will go from here? Audiences have a chance to say we knew it when.
Nonsense and Beauty
through March 24
Studio Theatre
Repertory Theatre St. Louis
Loretto-Hilton Center for the Performing Arts
130 Edgar Rd., Webster Groves
repstl.org
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