Modern American Drama: Playwriting 2000-2009 by Julia Listengarten;Cindy Rosenthal;

Author:Julia Listengarten;Cindy Rosenthal;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mauritius

High marks were not forthcoming for Rebeck’s Broadway debut, Mauritius, which opened at the Biltmore Theatre in October 2007, following a premiere at Boston’s Center for the Arts almost exactly a year earlier. The play’s action centres on a battle between two half sisters for a stamp collection that may contain a pair of stamps worth more than $6 million. Two professional philatelists – both greedy and cruel – and a third sort of young, shady, charming con man also enter the fray. In Rebeck style, what is at stake is not only the money that could radically change the lives of at least two of the characters; it is the sorts of choices and behaviours emerging from temptation, wealth, opportunity (however understood), family relationships and buried resentments that prompt ideas of deserving or entitlement. The play received subsequent productions in locations including San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans and Austin, Texas. Reading reviews from the various cities suggests that the scale of production expected on Broadway and the metrics applied by the major press in that city do not always tell the same, therefore the full, story about a dramatist’s work or appeal.

The title of Mauritius comes from the island where, in 1847 and under British rule, one of the first postage stamps in the world was printed. In Rebeck’s play, a crucial printing error has made two stamps in a family album worth millions of dollars. Instead of ‘post paid’, the stamps bear the words ‘post office’. They are in pristine condition and part of a collection, assembled by the grandfather of one of the two half sisters, Mary (Katie Finneran on Broadway), who has returned to the family homestead following her mother’s death from cancer. Mary’s father, who died young, seems to have come from wealth, and Mary was sent to boarding school at the age of 16, effectively leaving home at that point. The younger sister, Jackie (Alison Pill), is canny, impoverished and seemingly both uneducated and streetwise (she reads comic books and has been beaten up often enough to shrug off being slugged during the play’s climactic encounter as something that will yield a black eye but nothing worth a trip to a doctor). She is also the one who stayed with their mother during the latter’s final illness, while Mary, when summoned, waffled about visiting until it was too late.

We know little of the women’s personal lives, but they both carry emotional baggage. For Jackie, the stamps are a means to money – although at first she has no idea how much – and a way out. For Mary, until she comes to realize their dollar value, the stamps are a cultural legacy. Indeed, towards the end of the play she snootily tells Jackie ‘You clearly haven’t had the opportunity to develop an appreciation for for [sic] something as elegant and precious and timeless as that stamp collection. I know what things must have been like for you all those years.’ Jackie’s comeback is, ‘You don’t, actually.

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