Stage and Music : Babe’s ‘Great Day’: Sobering Look at Moral Bankruptcy

Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption would find itself cozily vindicated in Thomas Babe’s “Great Day in the Morning,” a new play set in the fin de siecle that also manages to pull the chain of the Charles Keatings, Michael Milkens and other bandits of more recent times.

Not that the elusive “Day” that dawned over the weekend at Costa Mesa’s South Coast Repertory is that blunt about it or easy to peg.

The author himself has called this sprawling opus “a little of this, a little of that, part musical, part satire, part tragedy, part melodrama” and he should know.

“Great Day” is all of the above and more, drawing heavily for its inspiration from Elizabeth Wharton Drexel’s book, “King Lehr and the Gilded Age,” but laced also with inventive helpings of Babe’s own brand of vitiating humor and sobering seriousness.

The seriousness is personified in the fictionalized Wharton Drexel character, here called Bessie (Gloria Biegler), the young, wealthy, recently widowed Philadelphian who moved to New York in the late 1800s in search of adventure. She found more of it than she bargained for in the shape of a curious new husband: glittery Harry Lehr (Michael Brian) who sang for his supper at all the “A” parties of New York’s upper crust.

To assess that tainted, extravagant whirl, Babe juxtaposes Elizabeth’s innocence with Harry’s decadence, tossing in various examples of the Rich (arrogant Caroline Astor, outree Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish) and Famous (a gently wise-cracking Ulysses S. Grant).

On the side of sanity, throw in a remarkable African-American butler with the memorable name of Johnnie Goodenough (Jerome Butler), Elizabeth’s crotchety but clever mother (a sharp Jane A. Johnston, in a new kind of role), a breathtaking, levelheaded suitor from Detroit named simply Charlie (the dashing Alan Brooks), and the pawns are all in a row.

What transpires in this chess game should not be revealed here, since much of the play’s theatricality is wrapped up in its plot. But the characters fascinate, not only the predictable one of Harry (we’ll get back to him), but also that of the complex Charlie, whose blunt candor is so refreshing for the wilting Elizabeth--and the shadowy Johnnie Goodenough, whose reproving presence among the glitterati is roughly as pleasant as a toothache. (Butler gives the character rigorous intelligence and great power.)

Babe takes big chances, flirting with high voltage in a scene in which Harry hoofs it in blackface, and heightening the society matrons almost to the level of cartoons. (Dunlap and Marr are up to the challenge, taking themselves seriously enough to avoid lapsing into full-blown caricature.)

But Babe also takes care to make the jester Harry infinitely complicated and Bessie tender and pliant (something Biegler delivers with grace). In Brian’s capable hands Harry is at once infuriating and ingratiating, spoiled and soiled, a Truman Capote of his time, though a lot handsomer, who is as dependent on the daily adulation he gets from the “ladies” as they are on his eagerness to perform.

Ulysses S. Grant, played with a mellow worldweariness by Douglas Rowe, is the jaded observer of this shifting landscape. His paternal affection for the sweet Bessie is gruff but real, and his determined detachment exacts from him some of the play’s wittiest lines.

Gerard Howland (sets), Peter Maradudin (lights), Walter Hicklin (costumes) and Michael Roth (music and sound) provide an opulent context, ingeniously structured on a sort of obliquely positioned Lazy Susan that revolves and tilts around a fixed center.

Much like our planet on its axis. But this is quite another world, or so we’d like to think. While the echo of the Reagan/Bush years is clearly there, “Great Day,” under David Emmes’ coolly dispassionate direction, is also a play about unfulfilled dreams and expectations, with the final determination of Bessie’s love life in tragic keeping with reality’s usual harshness.

It all leads up to quite an ironic and rueful ending, set in the final minutes of New Year’s Eve, 1899. Our revelers are now slumming in a “claptrap” bar. The scene is elegiac, filled with languid reminiscence and regret for their lives and the dying century. It brings nothing to mind so much as the hushed closing scenes of George Bernard Shaw’s “Heartbreak House.”

When the cannon goes off marking the passing of the century, it is tolling for the new one. As these tired players, stranded in their lives, project their hopes and dreams onto the generations that will succeed them in 100 years, the mood is full of foreboding.

It’s a chilling, Brechtian ending and a deep, sobering wake-up call. The millennium approaches. . . .

* “Great Day in the Morning,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; S u ndays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends March 28. $25-$34; (714) 957-4033. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes. Jerome Butler: Johnnie Goodenough Michael Brian: Harry Lehr:Gloria Biegler: Elizabeth Douglas Rowe: Ulysses S. Grant Jane A. Johnston: Mrs. Lucy Wharton Drexel Oceana Marr: Mrs. Caroline Astor Pamela Dunlap; Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish Director David Emmes. Playwright Thomas Babe. Dramaturg Jerry Patch. Sets Gerard Howland. Lights Peter Maradudin. Costumes Walter Hicklin. Musical direction, original music and sound Michael Roth. Choreographer Sylvia C. Turner. Production manager Edward Lapine. Stage manager Bonnie Lorenger.