Examining Serious Cases of ‘Typhoid Mary’

In 1909, the public was generally terrified of typhoid, one of the great killer diseases of the time. And, in particular, people were terrified of an immigrant cook named Mary Mallon--known simply as “Typhoid Mary.” Mallon was convicted of infecting 53 who ate her food, though she was doubtless blamed for the illnesses of many more.

There are obvious parallels between Typhoid Mary and the countless AIDS victims being treated as pariahs today. But “Forgiving Typhoid Mary,” the Mark St. Germain play receiving its West Coast premiere at Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado, is about more than the fear of infectious diseases and those who carry them. Robert Smyth’s charged direction underlines the larger moral questions of why bad things happen to good people.

St. Germain’s Mary, played with fierce intelligence by Deborah Gilmour Smyth (the director’s wife), is angry and contentious with all authorities earthly and eternal. These include hospital administrators who have ordered her quarantine and God, whom she alternately challenges and declaims to the semi-terrified priest who dutifully visits her every week.

Mary rails eloquently against her persecution, which is the play’s principal flaw. She projects far too much erudition for an uneducated and solitary person who cannot conceive of any other occupation but preparing food. She philosophizes brilliantly one moment; then in the next, petulantly claims not to believe in germs--including the typhoid bacillus she carries. And she childishly refuses to wash her hands.

Four other characters help tell the tale of Mary during the time of her confinement at New York’s Riverside Hospital for Communicable Diseases, from 1909 to 1910: two doctors, a priest and a little girl, who tell of their interactions with Mary in asides and in vignettes. David Heath is smooth and unctuous, a perfect smiling suit as Dr. William Mills. Kerry Meads is sharp and unyielding as a scalpel as Dr. Ann Saltzer, who would rather see Mary dead than released to infect and potentially kill again.

Director Smyth, who is also producing director of the theater, plays the Rev. Michael McKuen with trembling and confusion, a man of moral beliefs tormented by theological questions beyond his comprehension. Tania Henetz is ingenuously affecting as 8-year-old Sarah, who died of typhoid under Mary’s care.

As usual with Lamb’s Players, there are some fascinating touches to the production. To emphasize Mary’s oppressive ongoing confinement, Deborah Gilmour Smyth is always onstage, crocheting, before the audience is in and not even leaving for intermission. Mike Buckley’s semi-realistic sets are draped with long, grayish torn curtains, suggesting the veils through which we try to perceive the truth.

This play has been interpreted many ways, including as a treatise about individual freedom versus the needs of community safety.

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It’s hard to buy Mary’s case for individual freedom, since she seems too intransigent to even slightly modify her behavior for the well-being of others. But it is even harder to dismiss her question of whether God, not she, should get the blame for these infections because, after all, doesn’t God control everything? Which then begs the eternal question: If God is good, why is there evil in God’s world?

St. Germain’s Mary seems psychologically impossible: too intelligent to be so obtuse, too nice to be so willfully evil, too repentant at the end to go out and commit the same crime over and over.

Ultimately, it is not really clear what St. Germain is after, beyond a look at what people will say and do when trapped like wriggling bugs on a pin. Perhaps the piece as a whole is meant to be no less a puzzle than life itself.

* “Forgiving Typhoid Mary,” Lamb’s Players Theatre, 1142 Orange Ave., Coronado. Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday, 7:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 2 p.m. Ends March 31. $18-$27. (619) 437-0600. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

Deborah Gilmour Smyth: Mary Mallon

Tania Henetz: Sarah

David Heath: Dr. William Mills

Kerry Meads: Dr. Ann Saltzer

Robert Smyth: The Rev. Michael McKuen

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A Lamb’s Players Theatre production of a play by Mark St. Germain, directed by Robert Smyth. Music: Deborah Gilmour Smyth. Sets: Mike Buckley. Costumes: Kevin Jordan. Lights: Debi Marks. Stage manager: Jenny Lynn.