Alexander on Her ‘Honour’ in Broadway Return

There may be a reason Jane Alexander chose “Honour” as her return to the stage after four years of serving as chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts. She headed the NEA while Congress was slashing its budget and trying to dismantle it. When she left last year, the most common assessment of her ordeal was that she conducted herself with unusual grace and dignity. Reportedly, even Jesse Helms was impressed.

In “Honour,” Alexander plays a woman named Honor, who, in the course of the play, rediscovers her best self after her husband of 32 years leaves for a transparently phony much younger woman with incredible legs. More than anything else, the play is about Honor’s enduring dignity, a quality Alexander could sustain in her sleep. She doesn’t sleepwalk here, because she is a pro, but the play, by Australian Joanna Murray-Smith, is so lackluster that it wouldn’t matter if she did.

“Honour” opened Sunday night on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre. Murray-Smith pretends to play fair--that is, she pretends to represent each of her four characters on their own terms. But the deck is so clearly stacked against the husband and his mistress that the play seems like a feel-good fantasy, in a tony wrapping, for women who get betrayed by people clearly inferior to themselves.

When we first meet the husband, a respected newspaper columnist named Gus (Robert Foxworth), he is about to be interviewed and is rehearsing phrases another writer might use to describe him and his work. He is, he imagines out loud, an “authoritative voice” who “probes the social and political influences” in the “cultural heartland,” presumably New York. He’s right away revealed to be pompous and vain. When his interviewer, Claudia (Laura Linney), shows up, she is omnivorously ambitious, gorgeously blond. She commences flattering immediately, and with as much sincerity as Jim Carrey: “But you’re so inspiring! Some of the others were, well, lethargic, just old men.”

You can count the seconds until Gus wants out of his marriage. Honor keeps her chin up; their daughter Sophie (Enid Graham) is hit most hard. The characters square off in pairs to fight and discuss and trade philosophies, all in an elegant beige setting. Like the set, the play has a neoclassicist clarity, down to the hues the characters sport--Honor wears an elegant navy blue, Gus dons gray, Sophie is virginal in peach and the vixen Claudia favors red. The usually brilliant director Gerald Gutierrez responds to the play’s clean lines and keeps the action snappy and unfussy. It’s all very neatly structured and carried off with skill by the cast. But the play is paper thin at its heart.

Each character employs the same verbal tic, indulging in the nervous repetition of words. “That’s so . . . that’s so passive.” “It’s too . . . it’s too late.” “Don’t you . . . don’t you think,” and on and on, as if all four lived in the same dorm room and talked alike. Instead of creating a unified world, a la David Mamet, these speech patterns are simply mannered.

Thirty-five years ago, “Honour” would have been called a woman’s drama. Our heroine was a successful poet in her youth, a critic’s darling, but she gave it all up for her husband and daughter. At different points, both Claudia and Sophie attack Honor for forsaking her career and leaving herself so vulnerable. But no matter. Once dumped, Honor simply goes back to being a poet, and--voila!--produces a book that the critics love, because, in Honor’s estimation, they “see the truth in it.”

The cherry on top of the fantasy is that the home-wrecker Claudia, who seduces men so she can learn what they’ve learned and meet who they know, turns out to be more enamored of Honor than she is of poor old Gus.

The best speech is delivered expertly by the one unknown in the cast, Enid Graham as Sophie. Between shivers of anger and gulping tears, she attacks her philandering father, not as a father but as a man, a stand-in for a potential husband who might at some future point leave her for a much younger woman. Her father’s actions have made her imagine herself in that position, and she is furious. Briefly, the political becomes personal, and everything clicks. Then, it’s right back to the elegant, correct and dull world of “Honour.”

“Honour,” Belasco Theatre, 111 W. 44th St., (800) 331-0472.