No Mother to Guide Her (review)

Lillian Mortimer's No Mother to Guide Her is one of the few turn-of-the-century melodramas to appear in print, thanks to Garrett H. Leverton, who included it in the multivolume America's Lost Plays. The play, Mortimer's best-known, was a child of the "Ten, Twent', Thirt'" movement, named for its low ticket prices (ten, twenty, or thirty cents). The movement signaled the last desperate response from theatrical producers to challenge the new medium, cinema, whose sponsors had begun to exhibit several short melodramas for one nickel. With familiar stock characters in spectacular settings manipulating the audience's emotions, these plays tickled the fancy even of the non-English-speaking immigrants whose numbers and leisure time were increasing. Action trumped wordplay, villains faced punishment, and the just invariably overcame poverty, disease, and society's ills to earn their rewards.

Lillian Mortimer, one of the era's few successful female playwrights, understood the demands of melodrama. Born into a midwestern theatrical family and starting as a child actress, she later formed her own stock company with her husband, who served as her manager and producer. She wrote, directed, designed, and starred in countless melodramatic vehicles with which she toured the country.

Targeting women and children as her potential audience, Mortimer often focused on the theme of mother love. None of the female characters in No Mother to Guide Her is fortunate enough to have a living mother, but each yearns for one, as does the hero, Ralph Carlton. The play's plot is characteristically complex: villainous John Livingstone persuades the pregnant Rose Day that her husband, Carlton, is dead, and proceeds to marry her himself. Livingstone is assisted in his turpitude by Mother Tagger. This gypsy hag enthusiastically imprisons, beats, and starves Bess Sinclair, a previous victim of Livingstone's lust, whose child she has already murdered. But Bess is protected by Bunco, a Bowery girl and soubrette, a role originated [Begin Page 656] by Lillian Mortimer herself. Rounding out the cast are the comic couple, Lindy Jane Smithers and her long-suffering beau, Silas Waterbury, the town constable, and Jake Jordan, an escaped convict with a heart.

The BAT Theatre Company, under director Jim Simpson, strained to remain true to the spirit of
the melodrama—no easy task nowadays, when audiences tend to mock the genre's contrived situations and heightened dialogue. The urge must be strong for a director to parody the play, to "camp it up." Thankfully, Simpson resisted the temptation.

But his hands were tied by space and budget. Simple flats covered in red velvet, variously configured, were called upon to represent the great variety of locales typical of melodrama. Each of the play's four acts boasts a different setting: the home of Rose Day, a gypsy camp, a big city during a bank robbery, and an old hut in the hills. The tension of the tornado at the climax of the second act (the "sensation scene") was merely suggested by lighting and sound. With its long, narrow, floor-level stage and few rows of seats, the Flea could not possibly serve the text in this regard.

The minimal props were delivered and removed by black-clothed "unseen" individuals in the manner of Asian theatre. The facsimile of a fire, used by Mother Tagger at the gypsy camp, was the most elaborate prop. Music, requisite for underscoring the different emotions in a melodrama (hence "melo"), was provided by a spirited band who surveyed the action from a raised platform. Karen Larsen played the fiddle, James Ruchala the banjo, and Jeremy Blynn drums/percussion. The original music, developed during rehearsals by the ensemble and the director, evoked an Old-West atmosphere, and Lindy and Silas even performed a clog dance.

Distinctive costumes, vocal patterns, and gestures went a long way toward defining the characters. Especially compelling were the performances of Irene Walsh as Lindy in her long...