Archives for May 11, 2010

In the New York section of today’s Wall Street Journal, I review a highly satisfactory off-Broadway show, the Mint Theater Company’s revival of Doctor Knock, or The Triumph of Medicine. Here’s an excerpt.
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On Broadway, you play it safe or lose your shirt. If you want to revive a straight play, you pick something very, very familiar and cast a movie star as your lead. Otherwise, disaster beckons. All the more reason, then, to praise the tiny Off-Broadway troupes that specialize in performing forgotten but eminently stageworthy plays of the past. At the top of the list is the Mint Theater Company, whose dagger-sharp revivals of Rachel Crothers’ “Susan and God,” John Galsworthy’s “The Skin Game” and Harley Granville-Barker’s “The Madras House” rank high on my list of memorable nights on the aisle.
Even for so daring a company, the Mint’s latest venture would seem to be a stretch. If you’ve heard of “Doctor Knock, or The Triumph of Medicine,” you probably come from France, where Jules Romain’s most successful play is known to all educated citoyens, or England, where it’s been telecast twice by the BBC and revived on numerous occasions, most recently in 1994. In America, by contrast, the play is unknown save to especially well-informed specialists. Yet “Doctor Knock,” written in 1923, is a knockout, a saber-toothed satire of the medical profession that could scarcely be more timely now that health-care reform is No. 1 with a hashtag on the list of hot political topics….
The thing that sets Dr. Knock (Thomas M. Hammond) apart from his benighted colleagues is that he sees medicine less as an art than a business, one in which anyone who grasps the principles of modern marketing can make (so to speak) a killing. To this end he opens a free clinic, the purpose of which is to alert his new patients to the fact that they all appear to be suffering from hitherto unsuspected illnesses. (His slogan is “The healthy are merely closet invalids.”) The good people of St. Maurice have previously managed to squeak by on home remedies, but his methods are so effective that within three months the town hotel has been turned into an annex to his clinic and the bellboy is inserting thermometers into the hindquarters of dozens of happy hypochondriacs each day….
I’m not even slightly surprised to report that the Mint is performing “Doctor Knock” with consummate savoir-faire. Gus Kaikkonen, who runs New Hampshire’s Peterborough Players and previously directed “The Madras House” for the Mint, has polished the script (which is being performed in his own idiomatic translation) until it gleams like a dueling saber, and Mr. Hammond’s urbane performance is frighteningly believable….
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Read the whole thing here.

“There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.”
Anton Chekhov, “The Teacher of Literature”