The Explorers Club explores women’s equality in 19th century satire
Note: Due to scheduling difficulty, EncoreMichigan had to review this play during a Preview performance with the approval of the theater.
On its face, The Explorer’s Club, the season opener at The Meadow Brook Theatre, has a lot going for it. Some of the best actors in Michigan. A strong premise of a 19th century British satire looking at women’s equality. A gorgeous set.
The only real problem with the play, which opened Off-Broadway in New York City in 2013, is that it is not all that interesting or amusing. The writing, by Nell Benjamin, is always well intended, and there are sitcom-like funny lines dropped at regular intervals that draw titters from the audience. But more often than not, the dialogue and one running gag in particular, just wears as thin as riding pants on a few too many fox hunts.
The Explorer’s Club is not so loosely based on the The Royal Society, an organization of scientists and science/exploration enthusiasts and patrons formed in 1660 when there was lots discover in the world. The time is 1879, and club has never admitted a woman. Phyllida (Cheryl Turski) is just as inquisitive, intelligent and resourceful, more so in fact, as the collection of eccentric males who populate the club’s drawing room and bar. And she has returned from her own trek through the jungle where she has discovered a lost civilization–the NaKong Tribe of the Lost City of Pahatlabong, and returned with a member of a lost tribe, whom she calls Luigi (Lucas Wells).
One of the running, or walking, gags of the play is that Phyllida managed her adventure solo and armed with only a spoon. And as the God of the tribe is shaped like a spoon, they treat her like tribal royalty. Luigi–in blue body paint, headdress and full-on native garb–automatically genuflects at the sight of the spoon.
With Luigi prancing around the stage, trying to play the funny the fish-out-of-water role in the play, the story tries to make a meal out of a series of contrived events like taking Luigi to meet the Queen, a meeting at which he lunges at the Queen, misunderstanding the body language of the moment. At the same event, Professor Cope’s (Phil Powers) beloved cobra esccapes and eats Professor Walling’s (Chip DuFord) guinea-pig. It all creates moody, emotional blubbering mayhem among the sensitive scientific souls.
The set, by Kristin Gribin, and lighting by Reid G. Johnson deserves to be singled out. With taxidermy, leather and wood paneling, the team perfectly captures the dusty testosterone of a British men’s club of 140 years ago. From start to finish, the set is as much as a star as the actors. Travis W. Walter pulls together all aspects of the play in fine fashion.
Hugh Maguire as Professor Sloane, does an exemplary job of playing the bible wielding “archeo-theologist” who purports to have sorted out that a lost Jewish tribe of the bible actually migrated to Ireland, making today’s Irish actually Jewish. His bad British teeth are visible to the audience from the twentieth row. Rusty Mewha as the horticulturist Lucious, who is crushing on Phyllida, brings the right amount of dash to his role, as if he walked in from a Jane Austen play. Wayne David Parker as Harry Percy brings a wonderfully comic, imperious energy to the stage, as he often does, as a caffeinated, dare-devil, explorer who is out to discover… the East Pole? Wells plays the hand he is dealt as Luigi as well as anyone can, but the character as written relies too much on the sight of him to be funny versus what he is actually getting to do on stage.
And so it goes. The whole male ensemble does an exemplary job of portraying a dotty group of bookish “He-man Women Haters (a Little Rascals reference) of another time. The author clearly brought this moment in time to the modern stage to remind us that women are still being marginalized in the field of science, business and, indeed, in leadership positions in the arts. Our modern politics reminds us, too, that no matter how many women are elected to public office of the bench, too many of us have difficulty shaking the idea that men are here largely to tell women what to do or to keep “baby in the corner.”
The attempt is laudable. But despite the vitality and strong work of the company, wonderful costumes by Liz Goodall and Kristen Gribbin’s sets, the writing itself, for this critic, is neither sharp or biting enough to qualify as top-flight satire, and doesn’t measure up to the earnestness or potential of the intention, nor the skills of the fine actors.