THEATER ICON LILY DARNLEY, her co-workers and enemies (usually one infers the other) frequently say, guarantees a hit play whenever her name appears on the marquee. She’s also vain, selfish, self-absorbed, manipulative and vicious—but she’s at the very top of her game, and no one dares cross her. And woe unto those who think that talent alone is enough to sidestep her wrath, as the characters in So Help Me God! discover.
Of course, it helps that Kristen Johnston is playing Lily in The Mint Theatre’s production of Maurine Dallas Watkins’ lost play from the 1920s. Better known for her TV work than for the stage, Johnston is nevertheless proving herself to be one of our most talented actresses in the theater. And her plum role in this very funny, surprisingly acidic takedown of Broadway guarantees that her ascent remains unhindered.
Preferring long luncheons with her British lover to rehearsing the grim and dreary social commentary she’s contracted to do (at one point, fed up with the professor-turned-playwright, Lily scratches out the word “commentary” on his script and replaces it with “comedy”), Lily goes out of her way to turn life backstage unbearable. She secretly fires her understudy, forces the producer to replace the actor playing her lover (on stage and off) with another of her lovers, replaces the water in a decanter with vodka and completely rewrites the play as they go along. Everyone else simply stands back and tries to stay off of Lily’s radar, but starry-eyed newcomer Kerry (Anna Chlumsky) genuinely thinks that Lily is both a lady and a benevolent creature. After all, didn’t Lily need to hear the untrained and unproven Kerry perform only three lines from Romeo and Juliet before insisting that Kerry become her new understudy?
After that, it’s only a matter of time before Lily and Kerry come to blows, and when the moment finally arrives, it’s a doozy. In between, there are any number of hilarious exchanges, plot reversals and truly cynical ideas that mark this play as something more than just an interesting relic from another era.
What director Jonathan Bank gets ab solutely right is the feel for the time; all of his actors are giving marvelously period-perfect performances (particularly Jeremy Lawrence as the stage manager and Catherine Curtin as the blowsy supporting lady who insists on including at least one drunk scene for her character) that feel as if they’ve been lifted whole out of an early ’30s film. But the music selection before the show and at intermission is bizarrely anachronistic (Marilyn Monroe, “Que Sera”) and the stage has been framed with blown-up photos of the mouths and eyes of actresses. I spotted Lauren Bacall, Marilyn, Liz Taylor and Jean Harlow among many others, but though I recognized them, I still have no idea why they were there. Are the pictures supposed to evoke nostalgia for iconic female stars? Has anyone thought about the fact that there’s a large difference between a theatrical star and a film star, a difference that can be measured by the distance between Tallulah Bankhead and Bette Davis? Apparently not, and the pictures remain a show-long distraction.
But that hardly matters when Johnston is slaughtering everyone in her path as Lily (who owes something both as written and performed to Tallulah). From her first entrance, shaking out her blond curls and ordering the cast and crew into the rain so she can make a personal call, to her final chilling scene when she at last abandons any pretense of kindness and cruelly delivers the coup de grāce to pitiful, idealistic Kerry Johnston is a bitchy delight. In that one moment, Johnston effortlessly conveys the heartlessness that Bette Davis’ Margo Channing only briefly mentions in All About Eve, when she wistfully acknowledges “the things you drop on your way up the ladder so you can move faster.” Among those things, Johnston and Watkins make clear, is anything that can be used by anyone else to advance themselves. Lily Darnley is a star, and she is determined to remain one at all costs. And audiences wouldn’t have this terrible, fabulous monster any other way.
Through Dec. 20, The Lucille Lortel Theatre, 121 Christopher St. (betw. Bleecker & Bedford Sts.), 212-279-4200; times vary, $55.
