This Happy Breed
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Small is All

reviewed by Lawrence Bommer, Contributing writer
Chicago Free Press
11/10/2004

For readers depressed over Black Tuesday, this wise, warm and ultimately enthralling drama offers nearly three hours of hard-core consolation. It takes, it seems, a patriotic homosexual to write an invincible salute to home and hearth. In Noel Coward's moving 1942 domestic epic, triumphantly delivered by Nick Bowling's golden ensemble, we're deeply drawn into nine scenes that chronicle two decades of a suburban London family and friends, all glimpsed between one world war and the next one. At the start they move into their Clapham Common bungalow. At the end they move out. What happens between immerses you in a story as few productions permit.

Here's perfect proof of how tangential politics is and how life is really lived locally. Yes, Ethel and Frank Gibbons are affected by memories of the "Great War" and such later events as the general strike of 1926, Edward VII's 1936 abdication of the throne and Chamberlain's Munich capitulation to Hitler in 1938. But Coward's argument, potent in its admirable conservatism, is that England, like Frank, is a "nation of gardeners," slow to embrace change but quick to defend itself when an enemy clearly threatens. Human nature makes easy solutions for injustice impossible. We take the bitter with the better.

Seen amid the everyday bustle that adds up to a lifetime, the family deals with much closer challenges-a socialist friend's arrest for agitation, a tension-torn wedding day, a dotty sister-in-law's spiritual ravings, a terrible accident and a rebellious daughter's near self-destruction. (Coward is extremely good at not daring to dramatize the truly wrenching moments; their pain speaks for itself.) This is how and where life is really lived: TimeLine's treasure presents it all with awesome authenticity.

The audience surrounds the action, transforming the stage into an island like England. That intensity reflects the painstaking craft that's poured into every aspect of "Happy Breed" - eloquent video segments that document the current events the Gibbons avoid or confront, perfect British accents and preternaturally accurate casting. Every performance hits its own height but it's impossible to overpraise Terry Hamilton and Isabel Liss as the much-tested, salt-of-the-earth Gibbons spouses, Dana Black as their heart-hungry eldest daughter, Angela Bullard as a dottily spiritual odd woman out, Andrew Carter as a sailor who defies the stereotype by remaining true to one girl forever, and Kathleen Ruhl as the sour-pickle mother who not only imagines the worst but demands it. The sheer rightness of everything on this stage amounts to a natural phenomenon. TimeLine again trails itself in glory as it did with "Hannah and Martin," "Not About Nightingales," "The Crucible" and "Awake and Sing."