With the imperiousness born of decades refining local children’s manners, the woman known as Mrs. Mannerly (Leslie O’Carroll) sails onstage to meet her eager aspiring protégé Jeffrey (Graham Ward).
* * * ½ Stars | Comedy
Jeffrey is our narrator, a manchild in knee socks and shorts, an admitted nerd whose current goal is to beat the nearly perfect deportment score set by an earlier graduate of Mrs. Mannerly’s exacting etiquette course.
Jeffrey, as eager and unironic as one of the young elders in “The Book of Mormon,” pursues his dream in part by slavishly studying Miss Mannerly’s bible, the daunting tome on etiquette written by Emily Post, and in part by eliminating the competition (students all played by Ward), including a disaffected Goth girl, a sinus-challenged goober, a compulsive overachiever and an obsequious apple-polisher. Ward, a gifted physical comedian, ferrets out each character’s (sometimes nauseating) eccentricities with brilliant results.
Mrs. Mannerly, suggested in the script to be a woman somewhere between dowager and grande dame, is played to perfection by Leslie O’Carroll, an immensely gifted comic actress much younger than the part she plays here. O’Carroll recently played the coarse roommate in Senior Housing Options’ “Odd Couple,” and easily vaults from that slovenly character to the prow-forward Mrs. Mannerly. She suggests a supreme confidence overlaying a nagging sense of unspecified loss, mourning a gentler past of white gloves and calling cards.
The dynamic between Mrs. Mannerly and her eager student is strictly mentor and apprentice, wobbling a bit as Jeffrey’s classmates disappear one by one, and the teacher becomes her student’s champion.
“Mrs. Mannerly” is directed with a light, sure touch by Edith Weiss, who also directed O’Carroll in “The Odd Couple.” Weiss elicits the affectionate, self-aware humor in playwright Jeffrey Hatcher’s script. The set, in a former YMCA basketball court, is refined by the gracious accessories Mrs. Mannerly carries in herself for her weekly sessions, coaxing gentility from her pedestrian venue.
Will the etiquette class’s attrition rate prevent young Jeffrey from his aspirations for a perfect deportment score from the discerning local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution? The answer isn’t a given, but rooting for victory certainly is.
“MRS. MANNERLY”
By Jeffrey Hatcher. Directed by Edith Weiss. Starring Leslie O’Carroll and Graham Ward. Through Feb. 21 at the Black Box at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, 6901 Wadsworth Blvd., Arvada. 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 1 p.m. Wednesdays, and 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Tickets $38 to $48. Tickets at 720-898-7200 or at arvadacenter.org
CORRECTION: An incorrect phone number for the Arvada Center was originally included in this review. The correct number is 720-898-7200.
