Ladies of the Corridor is Fancy Terrible

As Dorothy Parker once said of something or other, “This wasn’t just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it.”

She might have been describing her own play, Ladies of the Corridor, written in 1953 with popular contemporary playwright Arnaud d’Usseau. Marion Meade, editor of The Portable Dorothy Parker and well-known Parker biographer, described Ladies as “the best play [Dorothy Parker] wrote, but most of the plays she wrote were pretty bad.” The best of a very bad lot is not, unfortunately, good.

Ladies of the Corridor, like Parker’s other forays onto the stage, mercifully languished in oblivion until 2005, when an off-Broadway production revived interest in the semi-feminist work. Hugo House has followed suit, hosting the Equity Members’ Project Code and Woman Seeking… a theatre company show until May 22nd.

There is very little to criticize about the production itself. The actors are all competent: given a script so strident, awkward, and erratic, the cast did the best that could have been expected, although they ripped through the dialogue at a generally breakneck pace. That seemed to be a choice by director Karen Kinch: the rapid delivery suits the occasional witticisms Parker sprinkles through the script and the period of the piece, but further underscores the myriad weaknesses of the story.

Ladies of the Corridor follows a handful of women living in a New York hotel in the early 20th century. Widowed or divorced, the various ladies are portrayed as facing a future of misery and loneliness which can only be relieved by finding a replacement male. The play disparages those characters who seem happy and find pleasure in the company of other women. Indeed, d’Usseau’s expressed intent was to describe “the women in America whose husbands die when they are in their late forties and fifties, and they are left alone for another 20 years…. I looked around the neighborhood and began to realize that there were a whole group of women having dinner at 5 o’clock at Schraft’s, and were coming out of the bars drunk, all beautifully and elegantly dressed. All totally unhappy because of the loneliness.”

This point of view is so completely narrow that it leaves no room for characters with complexity. Lulu Ames (played by Lisa Carswell) starts the play as a woman finally freed by her widowhood, although slightly insecure in it, and ends a broken, cross-stitching shell, destroyed by her increasingly strident, hysterical, and frankly bizarre need for Paul Osgood (Daniel Wood). The main relationship in the play, it is nonetheless completely incomprehensible. It’s impossible to sympathize with the widow Ames, because she’s insane, a proto-Fatal Attraction character just a few decades too repressed to stash dead bunnies in poor Osgood’s cookpot.

Ladies of the Corridor unspools several other dull, yet melodramatic subplots. The playwrights managed to make alcoholism, suicide, promiscuity, and petty thievery entirely uninteresting; in fact, the secondary stories are so boring that a conversation about hair dye is interesting in comparison, which probably explains why the subject is raised no less than three times in the text. Attractive costumes and a few good lines cannot salvage this tragic waste of time for any but the most deeply dedicated Parker fan.