Review Preview: "Mrs. Packard"

OK, time is short, so I'm just going to post a draft. "Web first" I was reminded this week as we tried to find a spot in the Courier print edition to run last week's review of "Henry V" (which, by the way, will run on Sunday--I proofed the page myself).

Abstract of my review: Very interesting, very dramatic, grim but not without wit. There's a feeling that we've seen this story before--"The Crucible" comes to mind right away--but "Mrs. Packard" is an electric night of theater, with Kathryn Meisle turining in an award-winning performance. Emily Mann does it again.

My draft does not find room for praising the lighting and sound, but they are part of a very visual and atomospheric production. I'll try to work some of that in before I fie the final product.

But for those who can't wait, we offer the following:

Another memorable season at Princeton University’s McCarter Theatre Center ends with the noisy bang of Emily Mann’s “Mrs. Packard.”
The esteemed artistic director and playwright is directing the world premiere of her latest true-life testimony, a genre she has virtually defined through works such as “Having Our Say” and “Still Life.” The case in point is Elizabeth Packard (Kathryn Meisle), the educated Christian wife of a Calvinist minister in 1861 Illinois.
Most of the play is set in the horrific Jacksonville Insane Asylum, where her husband (John C. Vennema) has committed her as a danger to the souls of their six children. Illinois law, we learn later, did not allow a man to confine his wife at home without trial, but could have her tossed in the asylum at his leisure.
Elizabeth’s sin? She disagreed with her husband’s old-school Calvinist doctrine, which preaches that mankind is inherently evil and takes every word of the bible in its most literal form. Her formal education—a rarity in her social circle—led her from a vengeful god to a loving god, but when she crossed the street to worship with the Methodists, she crossed the line.
Without warning, she finds herself in the care of Dr. McFarland (Dennis Parlato), the respected director at Jacksonville, where he quickly becomes infatuated with her intelligence, spirit and beauty.
“It is rather unusual to find a woman of such stimulating intelligence and learning in such charming … form,” he tells her. Sensing an ally, Elizabeth allows his creepy “laying on of hands” therapy in the hopes she can reason with him, but soon learns that McFarland makes his living curing the problems of men like her husband, not curing “patients” such as herself.
And so it goes for three long years, as Elizabeth finally exhausts the doctor’s patience and finds herself confined to the fetid eighth ward for the violently insane. Scenes in the asylum “prison” are frighteningly real on a set that will chill you with its cold detail. Fright-wigged inmates, looking like “Macbeth’s” witches, twitch, wallow, scream and cackle, surrounded by wired walls that surround them like a slaughterhouse cage.
The second-act trip to the eighth ward is even worse—straw mattresses on the floor, no facilities of any kind, not even a bedpan.
“Once or twice a week, some men come in and shovel it out,” says the ward nurse, Mrs. Tenney (Julie Boyd). “Like a barn?” Elizabeth asks. “Yes, like a barn,” Tenney says, as though that never occurred to her.
The shock value of the story at times obscures the point. While it sometimes plays as historical expose, “Mrs. Packard” is more Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” than Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.” The method of torture is merely a vehicle for presenting a test of will.
Elizabeth wavers on several occasions. She promises not to defy him in public as long as she can still think her own thoughts.
“You may think your own thoughts when you are thinking right,” her husband says. But she refuses to live a lie, even if it means her children will grow up without her.
The asylum scenes alternate with brief scenes from an ongoing trial to determine her legal sanity. Played on a balcony above the ward, witnesses testify as Elizabeth gradually exposes the evil doctor from the inside.
Her eventually victory (no spoiler here, as Mann’s script references Elizabeth’s subsequent books and essays) is tempered by a disturbing epilogue where the fate of many characters, major and minor, are revealed.
The cast is strong, but Meisle is on another level, deftly exploring Elizabeth’s many complexities. Smoothly segueing from logical arguments to ill-timed verbal attacks, we see her as wrongly confined, even as we wonder just how sane she is.
The trial scenes are somewhat superfluous, at times with testimony we’ve already heard from the husband. It’s as though Mann fears we may miss the obvious—Mr. Packard is a fundamentalist clod. Some trimming here could help tighten a long night, which exceeds three hours.
But there’s a powerful story here, with enough wit thrown in to keep the darkness from swallowing the audience whole. Thorns aside, “Mrs. Packard” is a rose, and her bittersweet victory is an experience easily remembered.

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And now, off to the Bickford. After "Mrs. Packard," a little Neil Simon should go down like cold beer on a hot day. Look for a Review Preview of "Chapter Two" late Sunday or early Monday. I got Mother's Day stuff to do tomorrow.

And a happy Mother's Day to all.