Page and stage in ‘Smut’ make vivid bedfellows
There’s nothing pornographic in Word for Word’s “Smut: An Unseemly Story (The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson).” That’s even as its title character, played by Nancy Shelby, stumbles onto what is essentially pornography, only more vivid. It’s live and in her own home.
All the actors keep their underwear on in the company’s verbatim stage adaptation of Alan Bennett’s short story “The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson,” and the language is all “please” and “thank you,” “missus” and “mister,” instead of anything explicit.
But that doesn’t mean carnal desire isn’t ludicrously, frothily present in the comedy, which opened Saturday, May 13, at Z Below. Under Amy Kossow’s direction, it reveals the ways that lust paradoxically both enslaves us and liberates us. It titillates, as you’d expect from a show with “smut” in its title, but it’s just as concerned with identity, with the inward war we must all wage for our right to be deviant, to find pleasure and joy, as it is with the libido.
As the play begins, Mrs. Donaldson has been recently widowed, but her problem isn’t bereavement, which she admits to herself has been “a bit perfunctory and even brisk.” It’s income. She embarks on two unusual means to get more of it: becoming a “simulated patient” at a local medical school, for doctors-in-training to practice on, and taking on two boarders, Laura (Rosie Hallett) and Andy (Andre Amarotico), who have racy ideas about how to settle their debts when they’re behind on rent.
Mrs. Donaldson is supposed to be prim, the sort of person around whom fellow simulated patient Delia (Delia MacDougall) can’t say “f—,” but Shelby ensures that the title character is more than just a lady. She might always fold her hands demurely, but there’s a whiteknuckle tension in that clasp. She might often cast her eyes downward, but that’s more in effort to brook great wells of feeling than it is to be polite.
The imperious med school professor, Dr. Ballantyne, finds magnetic “self-possession” in Mrs. Donaldson’s bearing, and playing that, Søren Oliver rules the stage. He savors a lustful pause so long that the silence itself becomes a narrative event, with its own beginning, middle and end. In her presence, he transforms Ballantyne from martinet, the sort who shuts down inept patients with Shavian verve and pithiness, to would-be soap opera star.
Another standout in Kossow’s proficient cast is MacDougall, who plays multiple roles, but the one you relish most is Gwen, Mrs. Donaldson’s histrionics-prone daughter, for whom every take is a double-take, every syllable an aria.
Everyone in “Smut,” not just Mrs. Donaldson, struggles with quelling feeling, with playing the part he or she must play. That might be the one simulated patient with bowel and “waterworks” issues, another who finds herself improvising a character and scenario so elaborate it becomes a playwithin-a-play, or a medical student who’s supposed to know all the answers but can only bury his nose in his clipboard. For Mrs. Donaldson, however, playing a part isn’t restricting; she learns she can choose which parts to play — even essaying many at once.
That inherent theatricality makes “Smut” translate deliciously to live performance. The short story and the theater aren’t always natural companions, written prose’s deep, luxurious dives into interior states often anathema to drama. Yet with “Smut,” Word for Word once again shows that page and stage can be friendlier bedfellows than you might have thought.