Lost Honor: Desperate Housewife Meets I, Claudia

​HONOUR: Theater Review

[NOTE: Reader Beware: This review may reveal plot spoilers.]

The Ruskin Group Theatre Arts Center’s inaugural production, Honour, features intricately etched ensemble acting worthy of thespian guru Sanford Meisner, whose legacy this newly-minted Santa Monica outpost perpetuates. Among other things, Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith’s incisive one-act drama, a love story of sorts that opened Valentine’s Day, is about two of this scribbler’s favorite acts: writing and sex.

The proverbial curtain lifts with Claudia (Ariana Afradi) conducting an interview with 60-ish journalist and columnist George Spencer (stage and screen stalwart Matt Letscher) for a book an editor has assigned the 28-year-old beauty to write about Britain’s top 10 intellectual movers and shakers (and perhaps fakers?), or something like that. Maya Angelou has rather famously said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Listen closely as how, in scene 1, Claudia confesses her lack of talent, thus prompting George to summarize his own oeuvre for her book. Murray-Smith is rather tellingly tipping the audience off here to the emerging relationship dynamic of the younger wannabe and the older established writer, destined (doomed?) to become lovers.

Marcia Cross (Emmy and Golden Globe-nommed for playing Bree Van De Kamp/Hodge in the popular 2004-2012 ABC series Desperate Housewives) portrays Honor (for some reason, when referring to the character, Murray-Smith’s script drops the “u” that is in the play’s title, which uses the English spelling of Honour), George’s wife of about a third of a century. Like her husband, Honor, too, writes – although she hasn’t published per se in decades, after she had burst upon the scene with a promising book of poetry. This apparently led to her relationship with George and subsequently her abandonment after they married of her own literary ambitions, which are subsumed and subordinated to George’s own career trajectory as journalist/columnist.

When “off-the-record” discussing their marriage with Honor in the course of “researching” her profile of George for her book, Claudia may reopen old wounds, picking away at a long- standing scab. In doing so, by harpooning Honor’s desertion of her own talent and professional path, the overly ambitious Claudia may be embodying the more assertive ethos of “Third Wave Feminism,” which emerged on the scene when Honour debuted 1995 at Melbourne’s Playbox Theatre.

The careerist, “grrrl power”-oriented Claudia may also personify the “sex positive” aspect of Third Wave Feminism. Using her sexual allure, after some rather frank dialogue convincingly delivered by Afradi, Claudia lures George into an affair and into leaving (the tellingly monikered) Honor. Less than half the journalist’s age, Claudia uses – deploys may be the more apt term – her beauty and sexuality to conquer George, not so much out of love, but in order to advance her own literary aspirations to join the firmament of scribes. It turns out that the supposedly happily married character depicted by Letscher is lecherous – or is 60-ish George’s pursuit of passion, which he once felt for Honor, a blow against mortality and the diminishment age brings to all of our mere mortal bodies?

In revealing lines, Afradi movingly divulges what makes Claudia (not Budd Schulberg’s Sammy!) run: While researching her book putatively about Britian’s great minds, the Cambridge graduate marvels at the intellectuals’ homes, brimming with books bulging on shelves, and ruminates out loud that she grew up in a household, sans these sacred volumes. Earlier, Claudia muses that “a writer is a state of being,” and she longs to shine in this rarefied constellation.

Minus the requisite talent to attain these aesthetic heights, Claudia connives to acquire this status via her sensuality, using Spencer as a sexual steppingstone on her clearly demarcated pathway to literary fame and fortune. If you disagree with this analysis of Claudia’s motivation, watch what happens after George, the professional critic, critiques her writing (which I couldn’t tell, BTW, if it was a stab at fiction or nonfiction).

The affair devastates Honor, who has hinged her entire existence upon (and scuttled her own talent and advancement for) her husband, as they contemplate dividing up their property, which includes a home in the South of France (in current American terms, this would make them not “middle class,” as Murray-Smith describes them, but decidedly “upper middle class” in today’s parlance). If Marcia Cross is cunningly cast here as, quite literally, a desperate housewife, I suspect that the “homewrecking” Claudia is a clever reference to the popular mid-1970s BBC series I, Claudius, about the Roman Emperor and the Empire’s ancient realpolitik that was marked by constant conniving, assassinations, plotting, poisonings, etc. (Although I wouldn’t go so far as to compare Claudia to Claudius’ contemporary, his nefarious nephew Caligula, a depraved lunatic who wanted to appoint his horse Incitatus a consul or to the Senate and would feel right at home in the Trump regime.)

While watching Honour, I thought to myself: “Self, that Ariana Afradi resembled British beauty Natascha McElhone” (Pablo’s lover Françoise Gilot in 1996’s Surviving Picasso and Karen in the Showtime Californication series), and much to my amazement, in my deep dive into the archives to research this play (translation into non-Trumpian English: I Googled it) your erstwhile reviewer discovered that in 2006’s West End revival of Honour, that Walton-on-Thames-born actress herself actually had indeed played Claudia, with Diana Rigg (The Avengers co-star, who was also the only actress to portray James Bond’s legally-wedded wife, in 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) as Honor.

Now, one might say that Murray-Smith has conjured up a conventional triangle, except that the cast includes a fourth character, the Spencers’ preternaturally pretty daughter, Sophie (finely wrought by Jude Elizabeth Mayer, who looks like she just stepped out of the frame of a Renaissance portrait). About four years younger than Claudia and still a student (I believe Sophie actually remembers seeing Claudia on campus), vis-à-vis the seemingly more self-assured Claudia, she may represent a type of aspiring feminist confused by the gender wars, unsure of herself and her role in bucking patriarchal society – which includes her famous father. She emotes like a daughter distraught at witnessing the unraveling of her parents’ marriage, which she had always taken for granted as a given. With Sophie’s inclusion, Honour is more of a quadrangle (although this play is anything but square).

With three women characters (one more beautiful than the other, I must say), the bearded, somewhat paunchy, balding George is outnumbered. Given that the bard, too, is a woman, Honour is clearly written from a more female perspective. (I suspect without knowing it as a fact that Honour is semi-autobiographical, as Murray-Smith’s own father Stephen was a writer/editor/academic who joined Australia’s Communist Party, which influenced her 2013 play Fury.) Having said that, Matt Letscher manages to hold his own in this tautly directed ensemble piece adeptly directed by Max Mayer (speaking of fathers, Max is Jude’s).

But this is not the first time the veteran helmer has crossed paths with Honour: According to the press release, “Mayer helped execute the workshop of Honour, making this production an especially meaningful return to the material and a powerful way to inaugurate the Kaplan Stage at the new Ruskin Performing Arts Center.” Mayer directed the 2001 production of Murray-Smith’s Nightfall at Vassar’s Powerhouse Theater, co-starring Patricia Wettig and Richard Schiff. Mayer is producing director and co-founder of New York Stage and Film. His directing credits also include Chesapeake, Dark Rapture (with Frances McDormand), Tough! and George F. Walker's Nothing Sacred.

Earlier, I wrote that Claudia may be a sly reference to Emperor Claudius instead of Caligula, and here’s why: Claudia’s enticing of Honor’s previously faithful husband into the more nubile woman’s bed may indeed be a sexual betrayal. However, with this adultery the younger female has liberated Honor from the drudgery of housewifery to return to her roots as a creative artist who once again pens poetry. Returning Honor to poesy may mean the restoration of her lost honor and thus be the revenge of a Third Wave Feminist. In any case, as the actresses clash wits, Marcia Cross arguably returns to her own roots as a graduate of the Julliard School, where she’d earned a B.F.A. in Acting in 1984. Skillfully conveying her character’s complicated nuances, Ariana Afradi proves herself to be a worthy fencing opponent opposite Cross on the boards of the 85-seat Kaplan Stage. En garde!

Speaking of which, the February 14 premiere of Honour marks the debut of the Ruskin Group Theatre Arts Center, an expanded two-theater venue with studio space that is replacing the next-door Ruskin Group Theatre, where plays and acting classes have been presented for about 23 years. Prior to the curtain, John Ruskin – who’d studied drama at Yale, Oxford and New York’s much-vaunted Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, where he became the apprentice of and eventually co-teacher with Sanford Meisner, a co-founder of the exalted Group Theatre – and Michael Myers, Producing Acting Director, welcomed the sold out audience to the inauguration of the new improved theater space and to the Kaplan Stage.

Quite an admirable Valentine’s Day card to offer Los Angeles’ vibrant stage scene, where ticket buyers can see, up close and personal, stars of the big and little screen, such as Marcia Cross and her Desperate Housewives co-star Teri Hatcher, who played the “spooky …all together ooky” Morticia in the musical adaptation of the TV sitcom The Addams Family, mounted 2022 at the Kavli Theatre, Bank of America Performing Arts Center, in Thousand Oaks. Honour offers a most honorable launching that augurs well for the Ruskin’s new space, long may it live and prosper!

Honour is being presented at 8:00 p.m. on Thursdays – Saturdays, and 2:00 p.m. on Sundays, through March 22 at the Ruskin Group Theatre Arts Center, 2800 Airport Avenue, Santa Monica, CA 90405. For reservations go to Ruskin Group Theatre Arts Centre or call 310.397.3244.

FUN FACT: Playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Fairview opens at Rogue Machine Theatre on March 14. Wisteria Lane’s eponymous Desperate Housewives dwelled on Wisteria Lane in a town likewise named Fairview. (See what happens when one has a mind filled with completely useless information?)