The Old Law: Or a New Way to Please You (review)

Making my way uptown to Marymount Manhattan College's Theresa Lang Theatre to enjoy a performance of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's neglected gem The Old Law: Or a New Way to Please You, I encountered more traffic than I had expected. Tragically, a small plane had collided with another of New York's tall buildings and everyone was confused and anxious. Perhaps it was this incident's pale reflection of another tragic event of five years before that unintentionally made this play's treatment of aggressive sons and their relationships to their fathers even more vivid for a small audience on that rainy evening. Performed with admirable fidelity to the text, with sprightly energy, wit, and pathos, and with an evident pleasure in this unusual play, this production of Middleton and Rowley's tragicomedy was a real treat.

Jacobean playwrights may have lacked the sophisticated psychoanalytic terms for diagnosing the Oedipal struggles of sons and fathers, but Middleton and Rowley's representation of the antipathy between wealthy old fathers and desperately greedy young sons certainly comes close to articulating that generational conflict. The prodigality of a young gallant, anticipating an inheritance with which to indulge in lavish apparel, sumptuous meals, and costly diversions, was the familiar stuff of Jacobean comedy. In The Old Law's ambiguously ancient-but-contemporary city, a new Duke has issued a proclamation that all men of eighty and all women of sixty years, having outlived their usefulness to the republic, will be summarily executed. Simonides can hardly wait to join his extravagant friends enjoying the wealth of their recently dispatched fathers, though he transparently feigns concern for his own father Creon on his eightieth birthday. Set against greedy Simonides, young Cleanthes grieves his father's approaching demise and hatches a plan with his dutiful wife Hippolita to fake Leonides's death and hide him in a bucolic hunting lodge. Subplots involving the pursuit of widows—both those whose advanced ages will quickly result in their own termination and lascivious young women who will soon be widowed by the new law—comically intersect this main plot: in one of this production's memorable scenes, the octogenarian Lysander (Darrin Banks) refuses to act his age, challenging his wicked wife's suitors to a duel, a disco-inspired galliard, and a drinking contest in order to demonstrate his continued vigor. Exploring themes such as the obsessive pursuit of the fashionable and the new, the garrulousness of women, and the conflict between positive law and conscience or natural feelings of filial piety, The Old Law folds wit and pathos into an entertaining confection.

This production's staging nicely captured the play's simultaneously ancient and contemporary setting. The play, written in 1618, on one hand explicitly locates itself in an ancient Greek past in which such an unjust law could be passed. At the same time, Gnotho's machinations in the subplot involve bribing a sexton to change the date of Agatha's baptism to make it sixty years before the play's fictional present—1599 (a date that could easily have been updated in this production to 1999). With a single weathered platform and Greek columns on the stage's left, the set evoked a stark ancient Greece; with its young characters clad in polyester and wide collars, the ambiguously...