The Corn Is Green

This weekend I saw the very last showing of The Corn Is Green at Boston’s Huntington Theater. The Huntington is a decent theater and – so I am told – puts out consistent runs for the Boston community. Lately, though, I’d heard that the consistency has been with snoozes… So, when I heard Ed Siegel give the play a good review on WBUR, I made note of it. (Siegel usually makes me feel evil with delight at his harshness.) And then I heard a couple of random folks say that the play was actually good. So I got some tickets and snookered my friend Stefanie into going with me.

The Corn is Green was written in 1938 by Emlyn Williams. It’s about L.C. Moffat, a strong willed woman of some means who arrives in a small Welsh mining town and starts a school. Among the illiterate coal mining children she takes under wing is a young boy who eventually gets a scholarship to Oxford. A movie was made of the story with Bette Davis as Miss Moffat.

So, the play is pretty dated. It is also very similar to My Fair Lady (or should I say Pygmalion?) so you can’t help but feel you are watching something seen before. But, that said, The Corn Is Green takes a few unexpected twists and the ending asks that the audience be as strong as the playwright made her characters.

The Miss Moffat lead was played by Kate Burton and Burton’s son played the illiterate teenager. Kate Burton has won awards for other plays and has been in movies like The First Wives Club and Ice Storm. She is also the daughter of Richard Burton (actor and husband number #5 and #6.) I think it’s safe to say that Kate Burton made the play worthwhile, but the supporting actors were good too. In fact, there wasn’t a weak one among them.

There aren’t too many options for traditional theater in Boston. There’s the A.R.T, which puts on absolutely insane plays – or so I’m told. Avante-garde to the extreme. I like avante-garde, but the looks on people’s faces who have been to these shows makes me wary. The guy who delivers the mail at work is a playwright and since he delivers my boxes of books from Amazon, we talk about what he’s writing and the state of plays and theater in Boston, in the United States, in the world. Art is dying. And no one cares. There’s no cultivation of craft, not enough esteem or patience for this tradition to keep it going. And then he suggests I read something and I make another Amazon purchase and I’m pretty sure the printed and spoken word will keep going.

But I don’t know what runs like The Corn Is Green – no matter how well acted they are – can do for the art form. Because while I enjoyed the play, and I laughed out loud more than a few times, I do not know how much I walked away with. True, there were some surprising choices, and Miss Moffat is a strong character – and she is complex. She is selfish in her selflessness and any work that captures that very human trait is worth our time. So, okay. All right. I recommend it.

But, I saw the last show in Boston, so if you are reading this, you’ll have to find yourself another play to go see. They’re out there.