Worth the Trip

by Toby Zinman

This veddy veddy English, veddy veddy dated play is being given a charming production by Lantern Theater, with four good actors having lots of fun with multiple roles and split-second timing. Based on a novel by Graham Greene (whose most famous works are The Third Man and The Quiet American), Giles Havergal’s adaptation for the stage is amusingly theatrical, and Aaron Cromie, Brian McCann, Charles McMahon and William Zielinski lay it on just thick enough under Michael Brophy’s spot-on direction.

The central character, Henry Pulling, is a mild-mannered, proper bank clerk who grows dahlias and lives an orderly, predictable life with no danger greater than his new lawn mower getting rained on and no thrill greater than reading Sir Walter Scott. Into this rolled-umbrella life comes 70-something Aunt Augusta -- wild and free, with adventures and love affairs both behind her and before her. After his mother’s funeral, she sweeps Henry up into her world, from Istanbul to Argentina, and he will learn not only who she is but how to live a life of excitement. Never mind that the excitement involves smuggling, collaboration with all manner of unsavory governments, marrying girls 40 years younger and shenanigans with the CIA, it’s all ever so jolly compared to weeding the garden.

The gimmick is that all four actors play Henry Pulling: The role shifts among them, as one hands it off to the next, and each actor plays all the other characters as well. Cromie is splendid as Aunt Augusta, and Zielinski is particularly fine as Aunt Augusta’s black lover/servant, Wordsworth. With a hat added or a shawl discarded, each plucked out of old-fashioned suitcases opened onstage, the illusions are completed by the actors’ shift in voice, in posture, in manner, as McMahon becomes an American CIA agent and an English maiden lady whose specialty is tatting, and McCann becomes an Italian wheeler-dealer and a dear-departed in a picture frame. There is not a whiff of the drag show about this, and the illusions are charming. Credit for part of the imaginative effects must go to KC Nocero, who designed the costumes.

The plot thickens considerably and boringly in Act II, so some of the charm wears thin by the end, but the show is, as Henry Pulling would say, a quite agreeable evening.

Travels with My Aunt

Through Jan. 4, Lantern Theater Company, St. Stephen’s Theater, 10th and Ludlow sts., 215-829-9002

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